


I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It

by WhenIFindLoveAgain



Category: I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It - Evelyn R. Loss, Original Work
Genre: Artists, British Comedy, Character Study, Comedy, Dark Comedy, Diary/Journal, F/F, F/M, M/M, Original Character(s), Relationship Study, Romantic Comedy, Romanticism, Slice of Life, Tragedy/Comedy, Writers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 38
Words: 29,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21761791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenIFindLoveAgain/pseuds/WhenIFindLoveAgain
Summary: A character assessment of life as we know it, as I and other people know it.I'm sure everyone thinks in pictures; all these things go by an make an impact on us. And it's nice, I guess, and a ringing experience to be able to sit back and reflect on the things we had created and the thing's ever down in the retrospect, and figure out how we did them and do themThis book is about my complicated, chaotic, disastrous, and delirious relationships with people in general, publishing house editors, Chinese women, art directors, the local Ku Klux Klan and the other local Neo-Nazism movement, along with bent businessmen and the Catholic Church. Involved is the practice, creation and deliverance of art, love, sex, humanism, drama, religion, spirituality and comedy
Kudos: 2





	1. What Are You Painting?

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not really sure what to put yet. I'll probably edit this note with something reasonably plausible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Word of caution; I swear a lot
> 
> I also have a Tumblr - @theartoftootimingyou - and a Instagram - @theartoftootimingyou

"What are you painting?" Gemma asked, walking into the room in a white t-shirt and a pair of denim knickers. I had leftover fabric a couple of years old dropped on the floor of my wardrobe; one evening Gemma had been half out of it smoking on the bed and I started making pairs of knickers for no reason at all. I liked the sound of the sewing machine going. The mechanical of it, how it stopped and started like a complusive heartbeat, my foot on the pedal. Gemma wore them like an alternative to jeans, shorts, skirts, and nudity.

  
"Say it, spit it out; who are you exactly? The day is drowning you out; like you wanna die, like you wanna end it. Colours of my blood, black and intertwined. This phase will drown me out, fire to the fire. For the ghosts I owe I weave a new sole; electic design on ethereal. But you know me; who knows when they're the bad guy." I said. "Should I put a question mark at the end of that? Or, you know, a question mark in brackets or the sort of brackets that are curved with a arrow in the middle that get used on family genealogy maps and that?"

  
"Wait, was the first part of that directed at me -" Gemma checked.

  
"No, honey, I'm painting them." I gestured to the two meter by two meter canvas in front of me. It was a handmade canvas; acorn tree wood beams and calico starched and ironed until it was crisp, stretched over the wooden frame. That's how artists used to do it before consumerism started. Having had to be crafted and prepared before they could start. Making a canvas reminds me of sex. It's pretty lewd, but it just does. You have to create what you want to create. "The part where I was talking to you - like talking to you - was when I said about the question marks."

  
"Oh."

  
"Sorry if I scared you." I thought about darting forward and pinching Gemma's bum; she'd automatically squeal and lift one knee up and pirouette on her toes to get out of my reach. Smile so widely that in the dark room that had only a few lamps on her white molars would glint like the lights that were fixed to the roofs in the underground train system.

  
"Your words are amazing. Where do you come up with stuff like this?" Gemma gazed, with her lips parted open, at my canvas, her arms crossed atop each other lightly beneath her breasts.

  
"Have a smoke." I pulled a packet out of the grey and black linen pinafore apron I was wearing; I had everything stuffed in those pockets of the apron. I put in there things I didn't want my Father to see, things I didn't want people in general to see. Cigarette's, matches, envelopes with special letters inside, paintbrushes, rose-gold earrings with in-set polish rose-quartz crystals. "You need something to do with your hands to go with your own words."

  
Gemma gave a soft chuckle. "You get me like ooh-wooh-ooh."

  
"Hmm?" I struck a match along the grate and lit the cigarette for her. The glow of the match lit us both up, but I'm sure Gemma looked more beautiful than I did in the orange glow.

  
"You know - ooh-wooh-ooh. Song of the heart - spelt, like, "U-W-U"." She explained, standing back so I had room to move. I appreciated that gesture.

  
"Is that a Korean aesthetic, Japanese aesthetic thing?" I asked. I picked up a wooden palate and put mid-tone red paint onto it. Classic lipstick colour.

  
"Don't know. Why?" Gemma said.

  
"I can see a girl in a apartment coming up with that; oatmeal coloured top, denim mini skirt, BTS on her phone and a nude aesthetics blog on tumblr." I replied, beginning to paint words onto the calico canvas.

  
"What are you calling this new piece?" Gemma asked.

  
"All the names I like have been used already." I sighed dirtily.

  
"Tell me the stuff." She implored.

  
"I would have called this one and it's brothers and sisters and all it's mates "I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It" but it's already the name of an album by the bloody 1975." I was genuinely quite shitty about that. Gemma quirked a very pretty smile, the cigarette held in-between her middle and index fingers, her ankles crossed together.

  
"You like them, right?"

  
"I think Matty Healy's a bit of a cunt but I respect and admire and pay attention his art and whatever he creates, whether he's fucked up, crying, on drugs, or still on his pursuit to find God in a woman. The embodiment of God. He says women are the closest thing to Divinity, and he means it in a not misogynistic sense." I gave my opinion.

  
"Oh my God...wow. That's just like -" Gemma hovered for a moment with the words. "That's just like "ooh-wooh-ooh" right there."

  
Gemma watched on as I painted words onto a canvas. Do you miss someone right now?

  
"Your head..." Gemma chuckled another soft laugh that were like a signature. "I had a dream last night where I was wondering what people though of you because you died."  
"I wouldn't say there'd be many mourners apart from the family." I said.

  
"What does that make me then?" Gemma inquired.

  
"You know what I mean, darl'." I turned and half-smiled at her. It wasn't a humorous smile, or a happy one. It was a understanding one, a knowing on. Reflectively sad, you could say. I got everything.

  
"What's with people in this country? This place is full of people that don't belong there and it's full of dickheads. Like America." Gemma suddenly said.

  
"America's worse off than here. They're swimming in their own shit, and even the rich like Donald Trump are just sitting on the edge of the toilet rim that us girls sit on so we don't fall in the bowl." I kissed her cheek, before pinching the cigarette.

  
"I like your philosophy." Gemma ducked her head, before rising to _en pointe_ on her toes, none of those special ballet shoes to protect her feet. She was a curious girl; one that did ballet.

  
"You like most of the shit that sprouts out of my head." I quipped.

  
"What do you want in life?" Gemma asked.

  
I scoffed a laugh, but I wasn't in a funny mood. _Fucking hell_ , I thought. "Fancy asking me that." I raised my eyebrows.

  
"What do you want in life?" Gemma repeated.

  
I walked across the room and put on Hozier. It was a slowed down and reverbed version of his song, "Take Me To Church". Nobody in the world realizes it's a song from a Pagan man whose former love and her family who became his wife and mother of two daughters had to suffer at the hands of the Irish Catholic church, along with all the other people who have to suffer under a thing called "Christianity". 


	2. People Try Too Hard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People try too hard. You always wonder what would happen the day they take off their mask and find out that everything is gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a separate day; about the next morning to the previous chapter which was the last night, if that makes sense

"Do you think, like, people do it too hard?"

  
"How do you mean?"

  
"Like...they're too busy been fake and then they take off their masks and realize..."fuck."."

  
I scratched my temple. "Always. People are cunts. People are idiots. People think they know everything and they know shit."

  
"I love this." Gemma's head tipped to the side. "You're not like anybody else."

  
"Well, you'd fuckin' hope so." I chuckled, looking up at the ceiling. Before I saw Gemma I had a couple of bacon sandwiches; my breath would be worse than nerve gas and even though I wanted to look at her I didn't want to breathe that stench all over her, even though it had just been pig, salt, pepper, butter and bread I had eaten. Not anything yucky like tomato sauce. I hate tomato sauce. The smell of it, look of it, taste of it. Revolting.

  
"Do you even think we're real?"

  
"What? Like Schrödinger's cat? In his box, he's both dead and alive even though he's in the box because he died of a illness caused by fleas biting him?" I replied, lighting up a cigarette. Gemma nearly pissed herself laughing.

  
"Yup, that's the one." She answered.

  
"Depends how you feel." I said. "If you dead or alive."

  
"We should do something. We ought to do something together." I scratched the side of the bridge of my nose as she held my hand on the floor. I put my cigarette in my mouth and held it, scratching my head and then my ear. Everything was itchy all of a sudden. I blamed the dust-mites on the floorboards. I coughed, and it had nothing to do with the cigarette. Ash crumbled onto the front of my white shirt and I sat up hurriedly, trying to brush it off. It left a grey and black mark, like chalk.

  
"You're pretty Pagan on the good times. Let's drain the whole sea, find something shiny and ideally worth a few quid." I suggested. 

  
"What could we find?" Gemma hummed, teasing. She moved so her legs were a "W" shape on the floor, taking my cigarette for a puff. "Buried treasure? Gold?"  
"The inside of your knickers?" I attempted. Suddenly, I was laughing. It was silent, my breasts bouncing up and down, before I grinned. An itch formed on the side of my neck and down beneath my jawline and across my upper lip, then my shoulder and my left cheekbone. Like a ghost trailing his or her fingers on me in a touch. I have that belief some of the time. That when it feels like someone's caressing you, maybe someone is.

  
I scratched my scalp above my ear, and then did the same on the opposite side. It was beginning to irritate me. My reflection irritated me that morning. You could tell I was pretty, but there was something in the whiteness of the skin and the lips and the tan shades around my eyes and towards my eyebrows and the glassiness colour of my eyes that looked funny. A doll without her makeup. Yet, even if I had make-up on...

  
I had earlier that morning when I climbed into the bath. While the water filled the tub, I had tried to my make-up - eye make-up - like Gemma's. But it's different with us. She has monolids; I don't.

  
The back of my shirt fell itchy beneath my shirt. I sneezed. Then my lower leg was itchy too.

  
"This is gettin' fuckin' ridiculous." I said at the same time Gemma asked me if I was alright. 

  
"Oh, give us a cuddle." I held my arms out as my face itched and my nose itched. "Good girl, come here." I gathered her up into my arms, feeling the heat of her body and the softness of her skin and the soap-smell of her straightened hair. 

  
I was still bloody itchy.


	3. Art Director's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Art Director's inspecting work and canvas's and asking about men and love

"What's the point of all this?" The older man asked me. He was thin, in his mid-fifties, in a thick neatly-cut head of silver hair and silver stubble on his face. He reminded me of Roger Lloyd-Pack. He had on thick round-lensed glasses that were black, and a navy turtle-neck jumper. He was an art director and critic, and was holding his chin in-between his fingers, looking down at me. He was at least five foot ten and I'm only five foot five.

  
"The process of things I want to scream to the world. I hate most of the people on this planet; their greediness, ignorance, selfishness, know-it-all but they know nothing. They're blindness to human nature and realism, they're insanity, they're hypocrisy, they're smart-arse intellects. The art itself is naturalism, animalism, tribalism. It's an insight to a Indigenous that will be gone within the next two to three hundred years. Just due to evolution, migration, immigration, wars, death, life, breeding, marriages. But the art itself....well, creating it. Having someone created. Living it. Waking people up. Making people feel. Making them stay a while. This is proof that I care. This is proof of what is me, what is you, what is them, what is everything. I'm sure we all think in pictures." I answered. On the last sentence I gestured to one of my canvas's and a manuscript of a work I had written, lying on the table.

  
"Have you ever been in love with a man?" He asked me.

  
"Of course I have, but where does that come into it?" I replied.

  
"Actually in love." He insisted.

  
"I've always held a searching, warm regard, as I can say it. There was one guy, but I knew better. I didn't really trust anyone, I had no kindness for anyone unless I deemed they deserved it. I've got too much realism and I know how human beings work; so I don't get into a state that drives me insane and makes me wild. Because who would feel about me in such a way? Look at Angelina Jolie - total fruitcake!" The last two words came out from my mouth as an exclamation. I had thrown my hands up in the air with a dirty, incredulous scoff. "Yet she's got the multi-million pound wealth, a whole brood of children, a husband, fantastically successful career - everything. Somebody in the world always wants her. And the only guys that wanted me were fat things with baby-fluff moustaches or old creeps. Every other guy I know looks at me; my clothes, my jewelry, my breasts, my arse, my face, my youth, and they go, "Wow, look at her? isn't she cool?". But they don't come close. They don't touch." I went quiet for a few moments. I had been ranting. "It's really had me quite lonely. But I don't dream the things people think I do either."

  
I suddenly coughed like a walrus as though I had blood pooling in my throat. I had gone to swallow but it had gone down the wrong way. The face was left flushed and burning hot from the coughing fit, and I was embarrassed. I had a bottle of Lipton's ice tea on my desk. He handed it to me, and even though it was a tiny gesture, it touched me incredibly. It was an alien thing to me, the behaviour of men. I had never lived amongst it; just observed it from the outside.

  
"Forgive me for asking," The man spoke. "But when I read your manuscript...it's the work of an old soul. Very mature. It's like you've lived eighty years; had that love and that time and that whole life."

  
I glowed internally at the praise, and thanked him. He left me with a hug and a business card, and promised to get back to me.

  
I've always got a feeling about people. This one I wasn't sure about. All artists are arseholes. Everybody knows that. 

  
Look at me.

\------------------------------------

I'm sure many people have the wonder of, "How'd it be if I met the love of my life tomorrow?"

  
I used to think that all the time. It was the incentive to not binge eat, to exercise, to try and make sure I looked worthy of someone's attention - the attention of someone I desperately wanted.

  
I'll give you a bit of advice. It never happens. Not really.

  
When I first met Gemma, I tried to look a bit like her. I parted my hair in the centre and straightened it to curtains, but it never seemed right. I thought it was the baby hairs, so, I gave myself a bit of a haircut. That led to a horrifying moment ten minutes later when I found that when you expose another two centimeters of my forehead, things start to appear and happen. Horrifying things. I tried to do my eye-makeup like her's as well, but it never worked. It just looked weird on me. I wish it didn't. I really wish it didn't. But maybe it's for the best; that's what separates her and me.

  
I've got my own style of clothes, my make-up, my jewelry, my messy hair, thick and black and curly.

  
I always do Gemma's paintings before Midnight; it takes me about fifteen minutes to do a black and white painting of her on canvas. For a coloured painting, or a knife-paint artwork, it takes an hour. I'll just listen to music and paint; I'll have a painting down by seven, eight, or three minutes to Midnight.

  
You might think I should show them to her.

  
But I won't. I never will.


	4. I Really Ought To Marry her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evolution of relationships

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You could have the opinion that only a few sentences isn't worthy of a chapter on it's own. But that little epiphany meant a lot to me. I probably could have described it better, but that's how it was, really.
> 
> I wanted to marry her.

"And you know that I love you so, so much that it hurts." Gemma danced in the kitchen to "Ink" by Coldplay playing from her phone. She didn't notice as I filmed her. She thought I was still in my studio with my linen apron and paint pots and cigarettes, with my own headphones playing my own music in my ears.

  
I really ought to bloody marry her.


	5. I Hate Sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I love thunderstorms and rain and snow and overcast skies

I love seeing Dad's with their children; pushing babies in prams, carrying little fellas on their shoulders and fixing sunhats onto little dots heads in their sandles and sundresses. The Summer's get hot, but you wouldn't know it today. It's a world of grey skies, pouring rain, and bitterly cold wind.

  
I'm in ecstasy.

  
I hate the heat and the sunshine with a passion. I loathe blue, hot, clear Summer skies as well.


	6. TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Uneasy relationships, Swarvoski sapphires and dealing with troublesome editors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The glasses and the car. Utterly beloved. That car is a thing of beauty. Highly valuable, and it even farts, especially as you change gears to go around a round about and then the engine stalls until you manually crank it up.   
> The glasses are timeless Vogue. I wear them everywhere.

"You're fucking kidding me."

  
**Seven hours earlier:**

  
"Wait, where the hell are we going?" Gemma checked google maps on her phone. I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses. They were 1980's John-Lennon glasses with a black tint. It was hot today, and Gemma and I were attracting attention. I was in a tunic dress with long sleeves that had the hem just below my knees, and the back at my ankles, with nude-cream coloured ballet flats and a pair of white legged trousers that same fabric and colour as my tunic dress underneath; Gemma was just in a pair of shorts and a tank top, but people were mostly looking at her roman sandals and her beautiful face. 

  
"Swanson street." I told her. The air smelled disgusting in Melbourne, even though there were trees planted everywhere. At some points the skyscrapers were so high that the hot sun didn't reach the ground.

  
"How do you know where that is?!" Gemma nearly screeched. "You said Melbourne's a shithole and you've only been here four times in twenty years!"

  
"It's fucking Melbourne, everyone knows where Swanson street is, love." I replied.

  
"This guy - why does it have to be a hand-delivered letter?" Gemma put to me. "If you're just telling him that he's a piece of shit and to fuck off - which I know you are doing -" She said as I opened my mouth to speak. "You could have just called him."

  
"You didn't have to come." I gazed up at her. I was sitting down on a vacant seat and she was standing, holding on to a over-head rail for support.

  
"I was already in Melbourne and I saw your bloody Rolls Royce from your Dad's vintage car collection outside Swarvoski Jeweler's!" Gemma exclaimed.

  
"Happy Birthday, darling." I reached into my handbag and held out a black velvet box. It had been Gemma's birthday a few days ago. She had spent it with her friends here in Melbourne. I ignored her for two weeks due to it. That evening of her birthday, I had sent her a text, and I had never heard anything back. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of her either until I heard a voice screaming my name as I thanked a middle-aged couple who had complimented me on the condition of the 1930's era model Rolls Royce. Gemma just looked at me. Her hand rose to her mouth as I opened the lid of the box, and presented it to her. It was a necklace with three sapphires set into sterling silver pendants. The necklace was worn as a choker, and the jewels rang down the line of the throat to the hollow of the throat, and just below. The stones were about the size of large peas. Gemma didn't make a single movement. I just closed the lid of the box, and put it in my handbag. Fury radiated from me at how pathetic she suddenly was. I admired her, and I loved her body, but I could have pushed her off that bloody tram into the oncoming traffic. For two weeks I had been in furious, melancholy, regretful agony that she had got tired of me and had moved on; I was the pathetic one, the idiot. I felt the necklace had proved that.

  
The day was supposed to be about me sticking it up a old editor from a book publishing house. But, oh, how it had changed. When the tram finally arrived in Swanson street, Gemma didn't come with me. I realized how stupid I had been as well. I had left a priceless eighty-seven year old Rolls Royce with a soft roof that could be slashed with a knife parked in the middle of the Melbourne CBD.

  
I still thought Gemma was beautiful, but how I fucking hated her. I never felt comfortable in Melbourne; the masses of people and the looks and how they noticed me now. The epitome of ignorance, people who lived in Melbourne. I was no surrounded by them in the streets and on a tram, and I would have to get a tram all the way back to get back to my car.  
For the record, why do I drive a 1930's Rolls Royce?

  
Because I fucking can.

  
I gave the letter with a bright smile to a receptionist in the bottom floor of the publishing house, and declined an appointment with the editor himself. It was raw and silent and vulnerable, waiting at the tram stop for another ride to come along. Been young and unused to large environments is a matter itself, but been me in Melbourne - it doesn't work. Just the form of me and the surface of my brain brutally clashes with everything in that place.

  
When I eventually got home later that night, I was relieved. The humid quietness of the countryside was a blessing and a remembered curiosity compared to the smoke and the rudeness and the ignorance and the noise of Melbourne. I smoked outside amongst the pots and plants in the courtyard in the back garden, looking up at a mauve-blue sky. I wandered into the fields at the top of the property amongst the forest of pine, Cyprus, birch, poplar, acorn, hazelnut, and oak trees. The sun had gone down completely, so the enormous star itself could not be seen. Where it hid below the horizon, was a small space awashed bright with peachy pink colour that looked like eye-shadow a lot of girls were wearing nowadays. I wasn't one of them.

  
The fact that I had arrived home by myself was enough to drive me to tears. But I didn't cry. I forgot about the letter that by now my editor would have read, and would have had a heart-attack over; pure fury. He probably would have curled it up into a ball and flushed it down the toilet, along with all prospects of me ever getting work published in this country. I just smoked in a dry grass field where one ember from my cigarette could fall and ignite the field, and burn everything to the ground.


	7. Light's Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Making your own kind of self-loathing and painting pictures of people who will never see the canvas's in the light of earth's day

"It's like your making your own sort of self-loathing." A friend observed my canvas through the helpful use of Skype. He narrowed at his eyes at the girl I had made fiction of, before telling me how beautiful and how real she looked. What a good job I had done. It was like he thought I wouldn't notice the first comment in light of the praise. I walked over to the other side of the room, scowling bitterly. With the computer held in my arms with it's back to my chest, he couldn't see my expression, just the room in front of me.  
"Hmm." I replied, trying to sum up sort of response. I sat the laptop back on my desk.

  
"You hate yourself?" He said to me.

  
"Don't be fucking stupid." I snarled.

  
"What are you looking for? What do you need?" He questioned me philosophically. We had known each other for nearly five years. He knew what sort of approach to take before I resorted to screaming blue bloody murder.

  
"If you really want to know, I'm absolutely fucking desperate." I scowled at the face through my laptop screen. "Desperate for sex, desperate for human touch, desperate for someone I don't want to punch in the face after ten seconds or ten months. Someone I can talk _Cymraeg_ too, someone that is exactly what I need. Then, frankly, I'd just like to get bloody married. Nice and settled and protected." I punched the calico canvas so hard that my fist went through it; the whole thing collapsed and brought me down, bent over, my head only a few inches from the floor. My fist stung from where my knuckles had hit the frame, but I didn't care. I swore foully and kicked the canvas and the beams across the room, before slamming the lid of my laptop shut, taking his face with it. I just screamed at the ceiling.

  
"Thank you very fucking much!" 

  
I think I've got "exploding" now to a fine art, ladies and gentlemen. 

\------------------------------------

I was sitting in the windowseat of my studio, on leg drawn up to my chest. I was smoking a cigarette and looking out at the rain. I turned up head as Gemma called my name. She wasn't actually there; I was just in a trance so deep that I just looked back out the window and continued to smoke tobaccao and tar and rat poison down into my lungs.  
The canvas that I had put my fist through was a woman who I had painted to look a bit like Rachael Weisz. She was lying in a red dress in a field, looking up at the sky, but, to the person who looked at the canvas, she was looking at them. I hadn't really come up with a name; I had painted it listening to "You Calling My Name" by Got7. I had reflect with a cynical expression about the lack of people calling my name. Therefore the character in the painting had had this curve in her mouth. When anyone would have looked at her, they would have felt the emotion, wondering what they had done or what had happened to make something so hostile appear on something so beautiful.

  
I had eight paintings of Gemma stashed upstairs. I considered putting a knife through them, or tipping fuel reserved for the lawn mower on them in the back garden and making a bonfire in the rain.

  
I let them be. I spent most of the night looking at pictures of her I had taken on my camera and uploaded onto my laptop. 


	8. Restaurant Dates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dates and selective music taste

"Hello." Gemma walked to my table in the restaurant in a high-necked, long-sleeved, skin-tight, ankle-length pencil dress that was dark blue and made from a knit-fabric. It was a dress I had made. It hadn't been for anyone in particular. I made that dress one day where I was fucked-up and sad. After I finished making it a few hours later - notoriously simple - I just gazed down at it in my lap. I was sprawled out on top of the doona on my bed. I thought about a girl wearing it. One that wasn't me. Then Gemma came along and she looked better in it than I ever wood. Her monolid eyes and French knots, tan skin and full lips quirking upwards. Better than me; always.

  
"Hello." I replied. My hands were clasped together in front of my chin. I had been looking at the flame of a candle on the table, waiting for her. In the process I had been going through fifteen thousand years of history in my head. _Cymry_.

  
"You look beautiful." I said. I meant it. She really did look beautiful, even if it was my dress. I had given it to her for her birthday. I had thought - and said aloud - "Oh, thank fucking God." when Gemma had tried it on and found it had been a perfect fit.

  
"Is that Billie Eilish?" She looked around the restaurant in wonder, sitting down opposite me at the table. She looked gorgeous in the candle-light. We were on the second floor of the restaurant which was a floating platform, with a view able to be seen over the balcony and down the curving wooden staircase. "I wouldn't think they'd play her in a place like this."

  
"They don't usually play Hozier, Lorde, the 1975, or Lewis Capaldi either." I grinned at Gemma. Her mouth fell open.

  
"How much do you bribe them?" She asked hushed, leaning forward with her forearms and elbows on the table, resting over each other.

  
"I get on alright with the owner and I give a nice review." I replied simply.

  
"You're taste in music impacts the whole dining scene." Gemma said.

  
"Yep, pretty much." I raised my eyebrows in a quick gesture, looking side-long over the railing.

  
She laughed. "Do you just not care, or...?"

  
"I don't think it matters very much. Only the bored, the single, the sad, and the very elderly relax back and listen to the music." I picked up a white wine bottle and took a mouthful straight from it.

  
"You're a total bitch." Gemma informed me.

  
"I love you too, darling." My love rang in my head as I raised a glass.

  
"What are you drinking?" Gemma asked.

  
"Can't you tell?"

  
"Has it got tonic in it - the bubbles, I mean?" She looked at the white wine bottle on the table, her brow slightly furrowed.

"It's the sweetness in it." I gave it across the table for her to taste. All of a sudden, Gemma giggled madly, a hand going to her mouth.

  
"That's cordial isn't it?" She beamed widely, her eyes glowing.

  
"Kirks lemonade with about three inches of lime cordial made traditionally mixed into it. That's a wine bottle from home. I love walking in with the bottle not in a paper bag and swigging from it and having people have a look. It's a look at my face, my mouth as the bottle goes to my lips, and then my backside as I go up the stairs." I told her.

  
"Fucking hell." Gemma said very softly.

  
"Yeah, I don't mind it myself." I leant my chin on my fist. "That came from my Nanna; she drinks it in the Summer."

  
"I like the sound of your Nanna."

  
"Yeah...she's a cool old lady."

  
Gemma laughed, just as "Night Changes" by One Direction played.

  
 _Thank you, Mark, with your fucking immaculate timing_ , I thought to myself.


	9. Tattoo's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> December morning's

"Tattoo my nipples?" Gemma turned her head to me on the pillows of her bed. She was in a silk petticoat that was mine, lying on her side with the sheets and doona around her hips from where she had pushed them off. Only a few seconds ago, I had been admiring how her breasts looked, slumped to the side.

  
"No way." I frowned.

  
"Alright." She said.

  
"Like fucking hell?" I leant up on my elbows. Gemma grinned. 

  
"Just a thought. Maybe on the side of my ribs. Can you tattoo someone's name on my ribs?" She asked me.

  
"It's a weird sensation." I warned her. Gemma had never brought up tattoo's before.

  
"You'll do it?" She blurted hopefully, her eyes glowing.

  
"Did you hear me say it?" I gestured to my mouth. "Honey, of course I can't do it." I flopped back onto the ground. I touched her thigh. "Whose name?"

  
"Hmm...my best friends, and maybe...yours." Gemma said slowly.

  
"Fucking strewth!" I said up like a bolt. "For God's sake - please! Don't you fucking dare! Are you nuts?!"

  
Gemma laughed, a bit in awe of my reaction, but I don't think she entirely understood it. While I was having a fit, she thought she was been romantic. Tattoo's are something with more gravity than wedding rings. A ring can be slipped on and off; hidden, lost, thrown away, even though it's supposed to mean something. A tattoo means something. It hurts to be put on your skin, and, afterwards, it's there forever, etched onto you twenty-four-seven. What if she came to regret it? What if Gemma came to regret me one day? What would she do then?

  
"What would you do right now?" Gemma asked. She cuddled into my side, close and hot. "Like, tattoos, bungy jumping, plane trips in a Spitfire - what would you do?"

  
"Hold a megaphone to my heartbeat and broadcast the boom-boom-boom, and make all the sub-humans dance to it." I answered cleanly. Her eyes widened, and I could see the wonder in them.

  
It was something alien to me. I've always had the belief about why the hell people like me even though I'm proud of that fact of what I am as a artist. I know I make good stuff.

But that's not a reason for me to be...for me to have this.


	10. Painting A Man's Body And The Moon

It's an easy thing, painting slender girl's naked. You can either look in the mirror or just have an image off the top of your head. The countless times you've seen your reflection in the mirror, the countless times in your underwear and naked in the bathtub.

  
Slender men on the other hand are a bit difficult. Whenever men and I come into the equation, there's always been a problem. When I was younger, it was usually because I was exotic; I was an interest in pagan jewelry and pagan clothes, on top of the fact even though I was interesting I was never quite their type. There was also another reason; my six-foot and a hundred-and-ten kilogram Father who gave the stink eye to anyone of male gender and under thirty at a pace of fifty meters.

  
So, unless you resort to looking them up naked on the internet, you're pretty stuck. I've never actually seen one naked as a rule. What I mean is I've never shagged a guy.  
Maybe it's the red lipstick. Kiss a girl with red lipstick on and it's instantly one of the foulest tastes you have ever encountered in your life, plus it makes a mess of you and your shirt. A bit of advice, girls; lip-gloss is better in the long run. Your lips don't chafe either under all the pencil and the colour.

  
It was driving me mad; I needed to paint a man. Break up the collection. But even in the graphite sketches it turned out a fucking mess. 

  
A man's body when drawn is mostly straight lines; depending on his health and weight and build, there might be a "V" shape to be drawn of the torso and of the chest, going down towards the hips and abdomen. If he's a fatter man, and the subject is pictured straight-on, the lines become roundly curved, descending.

  
Someone I was randomly sitting next to in a café - I had a huge slice of a anglo-saxon style bara birth and a pot of tea with my computer out and a sketch-book in my lap - got into a conversation with me. He was an old man. He asked me if drawing an Asian or a African face was harder than drawing an Anglo-Saxon face; the way the eyes changed, the noses changed, the bone structure, even the sense of enormity on the page. I told him that all you had to worry about with an Asian face was the eyes; depending on how your draw monolids, it can make or fuck the picture. Of course with a African face it's all about the hair - if given - , the mouth and the nose. Again, depending on how you draw the nose, mouth and hair can make or fuck the picture. Someone said the term "racist". I punched them in the face. Blood went everywhere, the person in question who was a woman in a gypsy dress crashed to the floor, her hands clutched to her Serbian looking face. When all hell broke loose with the café owners, thankfully, about a dozen people said that me and this old man were just talking and then this idiot with the blonde hair covered in blood was harassing us. There were a group of Indian exchange students in the café'; I don't think they were very impressed. They might have thought I was just having a conversation and tea with my Grandfather and next thing these idiots were harassing us. But, even if that had been the case, they just stared down at their textbooks and their coffee, not apparently breathing.

  
For the record, I hate hippies. A bunch of know-it-all's who are actually know-fuck-all's who steal native traditions from indigenous cultures and just parade them around like Vogue while they get high on crystal "therapy" and drugs which kill evolutionary behaviour in their brain. Waste of space's living on tax-payer money paid out by the Government on a system we have called "welfare".

  
Drawing naked people isn't about sex, either. It's about the vulnerability of the human form. When we do remove our clothes, it's never the actual nudity; it's the vulnerability and the trance that comes from it.

  
"I need chocolate or I'm going to die." I announced to Gemma as she came into my studio. I couldn't have her there everyday; I just drowned otherwise. I was home-schooled, which means that been young and been involved with people wasn't a thing ever experienced before. To this day, I still can't have people around everyday; I end up exploding and, boom! Those relationships are gone. Gemma gets that; it makes her sad. Some people need space just because they do, but in my case I need space because I get smothered if I see the one person more than two or three days in a row. Gemma made the mistake of telling this to her Father, who now thinks there's something wrong with me.

  
"There's nothing wrong with her, she's just been by herself for years!" Gemma and her family once had a screaming match on the footpath outside my apartment/shop/studio/gallery. If you own a building as an artist, or otherwise inherited one, the building itself is never just the one thing, or at the least you never view it as just the one thing.

  
"Can you just draw a girl's body as, like, a template and then make it look like a man's?" Gemma asked me.

  
"Doesn't work." Cadbury make a really nice peppermint chocolate which I always eat about eight squares of. It tastes even better with fresh cigarette smoke. Paintbrushes knotted in my hair dug into my scalp. "It just looks like a girl with muscle."

  
"Well, all men are just girls with muscle, aren't they?" Gemma commented, her head tipping to the side. She glanced at me, and smiled at my grotesque reaction.  
"No. No way in fucking hell. Just no." I said, drawing in smoke from the cigarette. The was one of the stupidest things I think I might ever have heard. "How do you explain the penis part, then?" I put to her stoutly. Gemma shrugged. She wasn't bothered of made nervous by my reaction.

  
"Not judging by some of my ex-boyfriends..." She replied. I laughed.

  
"I wouldn't really know." I picked up my pallet of paints and ruined a perfectly good canvas, wasting it, by painting another girl's figure. I left the chocolate with Gemma, and I didn't mind as she scoffed the rest of it. It made me smile. Gemma wouldn't know until I got to the face that it was her naked body I was painting. "Boy's don't come near me without a machine gun and a ten foot pole."

  
"Aw." Gemma laughed, her hand going to her mouth with her fingers brushing her lower lip. She regarded my back. "Would you like a boyfriend?" She asked me gently. I turned my head and looked at her over my shoulder, cigarette stuck in my mouth.

  
"Who the fuck - a boy...what sort of boy -" I nodded down to my hair stuck full of paintbrushes, my floor-length linen summer dress, my pinafore apron with all my secret things stuck in the pockets, the cigarette in my mouth and my bare feet. "Would fucking well want this?"

  
"If I were a boy I would." Gemma's fingertips were carressing her lower lip again.

\----------------------------------------------

"Even if I went on a date I would just fuck it up by talking and moving. What would I even say?" I said to Gemma. We were in the kitchen and I was cooking. I presumed she was staying; she showed no signs of leaving. An extra set of turnips, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, white fish.

  
"Just be yourself. Be natural." Gemm sat a little circular table I had in a bit of floor space that led off from the kitchen, which was long and thin and old-world.

  
I squawked a laugh. "Hello, have you seen me?" The knife thunked into the chopping board as I murdered vegetables.

  
"You're lovely." Gemma's chin ducked with her words.

  
"Hmm." I got her off the topic for a few minutes by asking her about how much of the fish she wanted. Danish peasant food; cheap and filling. Makes for a happy soul.  
"You've really got no self-confidence have you?" Gemma remarked as I boiled the kettle to cook the vegetables.

  
"Oh, shut up." I threw over my shoulder. I rolled my eyes as I fiddled with the aga oven; while most people of this generation are going for the on-the-wall Westinghouse's, I descend back to the mid-19th Century in the form of a wood-fired aga. Gemma thinks the aga is a thing of beauty, but a fucking menace to keep clean and run with proper function. The house always smells a bit like wood-smoke due to it, which doubles up as a heater as well. That night and the next morning, all you could smell was vegetables and white fish; it was a great smell. Usually it was Gemma's perfume, antique furniture, paint fumes, washing powder, and my cigarette smoke. It's not as though everything isn't clean; I vacuum and dust and scrub it to within an inch of it's life every few days. You have to in older buildings.

  
"I'm serious." Gemma implored.

  
"I'm serious you too. I own everything you see, and I'm from a family that has got most of the town by it's balls. That catholic church down the road? Not one but two paedophile priests served and abused there. That car shop down the road? Five million pounds they embezzled. We've even got a Neo-Nazi movement in this place." I leant against the bench, one hand on my hip. "Self-confidence, my arse. Superiority over everyone in the room -" I held my hand up as she went to speak. "And do I not have a right to be proud? Consider bloody that."

  
"Why are you suddenly so angry?" Gemma said. I groaned. I wasn't angry; I genuinely wasn't angry. I was just been factual; it's true. The embezzled money from the car dealership, the disgraced Church down the road, and most of the Neo-Nazi's in the place had been told by me that they were "sub-human filth" on more than five separate occasions. I can spot them like wine stains on a wedding dress; everyone is selectively blind. You can make money out of Neo-Nazi's; they're generally cashed-up and don't pay tax.

  
"Because it's a waste of time, darling. No man in living history apart from horny teenage creeps and elderly transients and paedophilic refugees have ever wanted me." I crouched down in front of her. "I once got harrassed by a old drug-user, and someone else tried to get me into a car. Anyway -" My voice got louder as her eyes watered. I didn't want her to cry, I was just telling her facts. "For fuck's sake." I buried my face in my hands. When I pulled them away I glanced at the sight of pink-coloured lip balm on the heel of my hand from where it had touched my mouth. "Honey, it's not worth the effort. Who wants this?" I pointed at my chest.

  
"Maybe if you keep saying this it'll never happen." Gemma put to me. I believe that philosophy some of the time. I think about it some of the time as well.

  
"I thought we were supposed to be together?" I said. "Or this just a case of where I'm a fucking moron like usual?"

  
I shouldn't have done it, for how much it scared her. I stabbed a knife down into the chopping board, embedding it there. My head was ringing. I don't understand that with people; I don't get frightened by things like that, so why should they the idiots?

  
I noticed she hadn't given me an answer to my last two questions either.

  
"I'm sorry." Gemma said, standing up from the table and fiddling with her fingers.

  
"You don't need to be sorry. Just don't waste you breath. It's never going to work." I yawned, stretching my arms above my head. I put the vegetables to simmer in a pot of boiling water on the stove once heated by the kettle, and open the aga with my foot, checking on how molten the colours of the fire burnt inside. The action made a decent lungful of smoke come out of the oven; I shooed Gemma out. You know what they say about breathing in smoke as it is. My smoking's bad enough.

  
"Positivity, as well." Gemma said, climbing over the back of my couch and sitting crossed-legged against the arm on the left hand side. "You don't have any of that either."

  
"Why be positive when you can be authentically human?" I asked her. "Do you want to go?"

  
"I...I don't know." Gemma faltered, her fingers fiddling with the hem of a blanket that was on the couch. "Do you want me to stay?"

  
"Do you want to eat?" Gemma didn't answer me. I went back into the kitchen. I grit my teeth, rolling my eyes to the ceiling and looking at it, my hands gripping the bench where only a few minutes ago I was faint-headed and happy and cooking. "If you go now I'll feel absolutely fucking terrible and not be able to talk to you if I ever see you again because if you leave now you won't come back. if you stay it'll just be a fucking mess so what's the point? You don't want to have to sit next to me and eat my peasant food right now, much less give me your body later and the two of us just fuck." I called out from the kitchen.

  
 _You do this every-time you fucking retard_ , I thought to myself. _You have to go out of your way every-time to fuck things up. Congratulations, she's never going to come back. Congratulation's, she thinks your a nutter. Fucking well done you total moron_

  
"Have you ever painted the moon?" Gemma came into the kitchen, her arms crossed, forearms on top of one another beneath her chest.

  
"Yeah." I turned my head to her, but I didn't look at her. I was still half with the vicious thoughts in my head, squeezing the edge of the bench.

  
"How about with a little man on it?" She asked, smiling a little bit. It was like the Summer sun going down, with the bright and fluorescent pink-peach oil shades it left on the mauve and the darkening blue.


	11. Slipping In The Bath

What does this mean? What does this gaze mean? Does she loathe me or does she pity me or does she just think I'm fucked-up and sick inside, like all my smoking as been brewing a cancer in my right lung? Or does she just think nothing of me? 

  
I can't tell.

  
"It looks ugly but it's clean." Gemma moved her hair to show me the livid bruises on her face. She had slipped in the bath, and she was scared that I wouldn't believe her. I wouldn't say it to her - it would come out as a mark to dry and dark and unnerving. I could tell bruises apart; the ones that were caused by open hand, closed fist, slipping on the slippery floor of a bathtub. "Oh, don't worry over me, Teagie."

  
Across the tops of her cheekbone, the right side of her jaw, her nose, and her eye were varying shades of black and blue and mustard. He right eye look permanently watery. "I hit my head as well." She confessed to me. "I was just lying there naked on the floor and I couldn't open my mouth to call or anything. It really, really hurt." She chuckled abashedly to herself, her fingertips caressing the bruising. "I don't have any ice packs at home so I just put some frozen corn in a bag on there for an hour. Everybody looks at me and they think my boyfriend or my husband has beat me up." Gemma's tone sounded sick.

  
"Do you have some make-up you can put on it?" I asked. She nodded.

  
"I didn't put any on because either way I knew you'd notice." She gestured to her face. "You've got a habit for that, love."

  
"Yeah?" Inside, my organs sung at the fact that Gemma had called me love. I thought her hair looked amazing today. It was up in a French knot with two equal sized trendles falling down either side of her face. She looked beautiful. "Mystery Of Love" was playing by Sufjan Steven's on my laptop on repeat. "I can make you something for that, but it's bright orange and goes to a crust if it gets caught in your hair."

  
Ten minutes later I was carefully massaging oil with my fingertips into her skin, before using a mini spatula to put a teal paste made from eucalyptus leaf onto the bruises. Human touch is a powerful thing; I knew she wouldn't feel it like I did. I couldn't believe that somehow I had the right in the world to be able to touch her skin like this. There's a dedication when you're doing your best to help someone you love. "It'll feel cold, with an odour." I said to her. "Like you've just put Vicks on your chest. Close your eyes love; they'll water a bit from this stuff, it's pretty potent."

  
"How long does this stay on for?" Gemma asked.

  
"Twenty minutes. We wipe it off with a damp cloth; I've got some calico upstairs." I told her.

  
"Did you make this up?" Gemma pointed to the thick but smooth paste on her face.

  
"You can't get that stuff in a bottle." I answered.

  
"No, Teag, I mean did you create this? Were you sick one day and found this worked?"

  
"Eucalyptus is good for swelling and bruises. Just leave it for a bit. Listen to some music."


	12. Pissing In The Bushes

Ethan Knowles. I should probably worship him. A God amongst ignorant, arrogant, shit-for-brain selfish Australian men. I met him because a voile skirt flew up and everyone at the traffic lights saw my bare bum. I saw him again in the library; he was looking at Robert Pattinson murder books and I realized that he was just like me.

  
He doesn't have to lean down half a mile to kiss me. Not that he ever has. he just said it one day. We were discussing height and weight and Russian models and botox one day. I've got a thing about short-women; "The consequence is that she has to carry a apple crate everywhere or her bloke has to become the hunchback of Notre dam every-time she wants a kiss."

  
"I wouldn't have to bend down to kiss you." Ethan said to me. We were sitting on a brick wall in one of the more rural addresses. I was smoking. I was sitting on his right, but then I came to sit on his left, because of the way the wind blew. The smoke that I exhaled out of my lungs would come to settle into his and form a cancer.

  
"Nah, you wouldn't." I looked at him, before grinning. Bridgette Bardot hair that day. Mascara, brown eyeliner. Tights with holes in them and knee-high leather boots. I had on a khaki coloured tunic dress with my ankle length denim skirt on underneath, but it had gotten too hot, so I was just in the tunic dress which went down to my mid-calves of my legs anyway. The skirt was folded neatly and in my handbag along with Ethan's denim jacket. He was wearing it around his hips and then over his shoulders. I told him just to give it to me.

  
"Don't get a buzzcut." I said of of soft blond hair. "You'll look like you've come out of Auschwitz."

Ethan laughed. He doesn't get offended by anything I say. I never mean to offend him, anyway.

I had a bottle of coke that was his in my bag as well. He fished it out and had a long drink. I liked the way his throat looked when he swigged something. There was about an inch left in the bottle. He was really sweet and offered it to me. I drank it in one gulp. He exclaimed.

  
"You don't have trouble swallowing tablets then?" he said to me.

  
"Or deep-throating for the matter." I sucked on the filter of the cigarette, only to find it had gone out. Ethan gave a mildly appalled laugh as I fetched out my matches and lit it again. I love how when you inhale on a cigarette, the tip burns fierce and bright an orange as the smoke goes into your lungs. Smoking's an art. It doesn't just cause cancer.

  
"You wanna walk much further?"

  
"Hm? Yeah, alright, I don't mind. It's lovely."

  
"Yeah, it's pretty out here. A lot of gorse and scotch thistles, though. You'd think someone'd clean 'em up."

  
"Australian mentality for you." I laughed as Ethan smiled in a way that his whole body glowed. He loves me, he loves me, he loves me, he totally fucking adores me, I'm a God. You're a God, Teagan Hughes, I thought to myself, euphoric.

  
"You like BBC Radio One?"

  
"What, on Youtube?" I skirted around Scotch thistles as we walked through the field. Ethan walked with his hands in his pockets. It was an unfamiliar territory with him. The psychology of boy's and what Ethan thought I had down to a fine art; but that's not the same as spending physical time with them when you can fall over any second and end up in the A&E with a prickle up your arse.

  
"Yeah, and the real thing?" I said. We talked about that for a while. Charlie XCX's cover of the 1975, Hozier doing Sam Smith, how Demi Lovato should be executed for her cover of "Take Me To Church" by Hozier.

  
"Shit, I'm busting." Ethan announced all of a sudden. He looked quite shaken all of a sudden. I laughed. I pointed over to a gorse bush.

  
"Just have a piss in the bush, it's alright, I'm not gonna look." I said to him. "Make sure there's no foxes there; they might want a bite of your sausage."

  
I lit up another smoke and wandered off a couple of meters, keeping my back to Ethan as he went around his business. I thumbed my brow, and philosophized. He actually got nervous over the fact that I might be able to hear him having a piss in the middle of a field? Most men I knew - my Grandfather, my Father - if you needed a leak, you needed a leak. A no fuss attitude. Either that or you just held on. 

  
Ethan was blushing as he came up beside me. I just laughed. He was shy all of a sudden, but we still got on.


	13. Fuck Like Real People Do

"Put your sweet lips on my lips, and we'll just fuck like real people do." I crooned the Hozier song to Ethan. He grinned. He couldn't believe I was a smoker since I was eleven and could sing like that.

  
"Sauve." Ethan remarked of it.

  
We cracked up laughing.

  
"Do you think divorced men think about their sons much?" Ethan thought aloud. Ethan is a boy that is English; all Australian boys are fucking retards, honestly. But then you've got the ones who act like English, Scots, Welsh, Scandinavian, Germans, Norse and Serbians because that's what they are. Ethan's a beautiful blend of English and French Anglo-Saxon. He's so gorgeous. I told him that; the little genealogy. Because of it we had spent two hours in a park. He would pick out the odd person and whisper to me, "What have they got in them, then, oh, Bardess?"

  
"She in particular is Creole-French colonial mix." I replied to a dark-skinned lady with dreadlocks and a baby on her hip. That had been a few days ago.

  
"Is that you then, is it?" I said to Ethan now.

  
He shifted awkwardly. I got up from sitting beside him, and spun on my heels on the bench.

  
"I love myself, I want you to love me..." I sang in a slowed-down version of that Divinyl's song. I clasped my hands behind my back and hopped a few steps for a meter or two, before turning back. I looked at Ethan, my chin ducked. "When I'm feeling down, I want you above me..." I'm not vain, but it's incredible how a song sounds - especially a song like that - when it's stripped down completely. "I search myself, I want you to find me..." I couldn't help but hesitate for a second; I had butterflies crawling up my spine. "I forget myself, I want you to remind me -"

  
"I don't want anybody else; when I think about you, I touch myself." A deep, masculine voice rang and both he and I looked up to see Ethan's father, walking across the empty hall to us. "Oh, I don't want anybody else, oh, no. Oh, no, oh, no."

  
"Hey Dad." Ethan got up, and straightened the hem of his shirt. I smiled as politely as I could, waving to his Dad and saying hello.

  
 _Shit it and shit a brick_ , I thought.

  
"But if you loved me why'd you leave me? Take my body, take my body..." I continued to walk back and forth across the stage even after Ethan had gone with his Dad. First time in my life I haven't totally fucked-up a boy's head by been relatively normal.


	14. Joshua Hong Under The Yuletide Tree

Gemma and I sat outside on the cast iron fire-exit belcony and stairs that had been erected in the 1940's. It was shining brightly, and the whole day reminded me of a Cotswold summer. I missed England and Wales with a passion."Do you ever think about people from one night stands?" I asked Gemma.

  
"I've not had very many of them." She answered. "What about you?"

  
"Never." A warm wind blew through the air and made my already messy hair even more of a mess, while trendles of Gemma's hair touched and danced gracefully across her face.  
"Why never?" Gemma asked. She was wearing a off-white dress with purple flowers on it and black leather ankle-boots with Native-American fringing. I was in a ankle-length denim skirt and a grey singlet.

  
"You know me." I mused. "I could bury the sun."

  
Gemma laughed. "Ok." She said brightly.

  
"Don't take this the wrong way but how would it be if you had to bury me?" I quipped. I was going to light up a smoke in a few minutes.

  
Gemma looked at me. "Teagan?" She questioned.

  
"You know, concept art. Concept of having the bury a friend." I lit a cigarette. Gemma didn't answer me on that. I knew she was going to file it away in the "weird shit that Teagan says" box

  
"What do you want for Christmas?" Gemma replied instead.

  
"I don't need clothes, I don't need jewelry, I don't need makeup. I don't need shoes, I don't needs LP's; you can just download them nowadays. I don't know." I worked through the matter.

  
"Joshua Hong?" Gemma suggested. I laughed. She knew I thought he was cute even though the Christianity was a bit of a disappointment; there's always some defect with them. Come on; I'm a Native _Cymry_ Pagan. What do you expect me to say? 

  
"Yeah, that sounds good." We walked inside and stood in the room between my studio, the loft bedrooms and the stairs down to the shop/gallery below. Looked at the Yule tree.  
"It's got more decorations at the top than the bottom." Gemma remarked as a smoke halo surrounded my head and worked it's smell into my hair when I had washed it this morning. "What if I could get you him and his boyfriend or something under there as well -" She pointed to underneath the tree. "He looks gay."

  
I rolled my eyes, before grinning. "Yay, threesome!" I tucked one of my arms around my waist. Gemma took one look at me before walking off. I laughed.

  
"All I want is nothing more than to hear you knocking at my door..." I sung lowly, putting the cigarette back into my mouth and sucking on the filter. There's a trick; if you put your nail against the under skin of you upper lip, you can distort a smoke ring to look like a love heart. I've got that nailed down to a fine art. I wonder if Gemma keeps a box for stuff like that as well.

  
"Weird but funny but romantic-meant shit that Teagie does".


	15. Pat Stole These Flowers From A Cemetary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can tell, I'm really not impressed over this. I don't believe in pinching flowers from people's graves - no one does, it's ethical and human not to do something like this. I'll stop here - I antagonize this boy enough over that event. Little beggar
> 
> So...the chaos so far
> 
> Do you like it?
> 
> I get at this point there's not much a story line, but there's a chapter listed in the index called "Pink Walk". From that chapter things get very interesting and very political

"You prick!" I hit him over the head with the boquet of roses. "You stole these from the cemetery!"

\---------------------------------------

When Yule arrives, Winter Romance - if in the UK - comes into the air, while down under, Summer Shit-For-Brains is making everyone sweat like a pig.  
That'd be typical, right? Australian mentality for you.

  
Ethan's best mate was called Pat - short for Patrick. I didn't expect much brains; the Irish shall be Irish. I was pleasantly surprised; he wasn't a complete arsehead. Still a little bit though. Ethan had the same mature and old-world temperament as me, been home-schooled as well. He brought Pat into my building as naturally as though they were just hanging out at the Italian pizza shop in town like Pat had done when he was fourteen. Pat stared at everything; he stared at my furniture, he stared at me and my clothes, he stared at the artwork on the walls and the clothes on the racks.

  
"You're how old?" He echoed when I and Ethan answered his question. He looked quite abashed all of a sudden.

  
Ethan deserves a medal for how he coordinated me and Pat so I wouldn't end up wrapping one of my sewing rulers around his neck, and Pat wouldn't get political when he saw the Welsh flag on the wall and me calling Ethan "annwyl" and "cariad" and "dyn".

  
"What're you doin' later?" Pat asked me. "You, like...wanna come hang out with us?" He looked a bit hesitant asking. I almost felt a bit sorry for him; first time he met a woman like me. First time Pat saw me I was wearing that tight wrap-waist black dress with the belt tied underneath my breasts.

  
"Yeah, if you're fine with that. Wanna a smoke?" I held out the packet for him. He looked at me incredulously. I was sitting sideways on one of the armchairs in the private space upstairs, my legs dangling over the arm with my back propped up on the other.

  
"Chicks smoke too, love." I blew out a smoke ring. He and Ethan laughed. They thought that was pretty cool.

  
We ended up going into town and just wandering around for ages. A ten ton of people looked at us, and turned back in the street as we went past.

  
"Nice work, Teag." Ethan said to me, pinching my bum. As Pat exclaimed and whistled I got a handful of Ethan's crotch, and his penis through his jeans. I was having a really great time, my boots clicking rhythmically against the ground. We parted ways at about half five. I saw Pat having a look as Ethan kissed my cheek and grasped my fingers for a minute like I was his girlfriend, before nicking off.

  
About half-seven I was relaxing upstairs and making notes in my lodgebook with some Vodka and looking at the paintings I had done of Gemma's naked body, when i heard shouting outside. Ethan and Pat had climbed over the fence and were in the garden near the barn, and were making a racket to get my attention.

  
"Don't have your headphones on all the time!" Ethan called up. He was grinning. From behind his back, Pat produced a bouquet of roses, and held them up. I went weak at my knees. Literally. I rolled my dress up around my thighs and climbed out of the window onto the fire escape railing bare foot. Pat whistled and carried on like an idiot, and Ethan just smiled with his hands in his pockets.

  
"For you." Pat held the flowers out to me.

  
I was nearly a wreck inside. Never before had I been given flowers, let alone by a boy. I was sort of delirious, I was so incredulous over it. Everything felt quite faint and other-wordly. It really meant a lot to me. The rose's were beautiful and a pure dark shade of red; there was no a single imperfection on the petals. Pat was standing before me, watching me gaze down at them with his curling black hair, wide flat mouth, sharp eyes and his cap with his hoodie, shorts, sneakers and socks. I was happy.

  
I saw a tag fluttering around the paper wrapping, and my throat closed up at the thought that he and Ethan might have written something.

  
"To Darling Dad, we miss you so much and we love you", it read. I turned the card over. The card had been purchased at the Catholic St Francis Cemetery just outside the village. "You prick!" I hit him over the head with the bouquet of roses. "You stole these from the cemetery!"

  
Ethan came to put space in-between the two of us, and I shoved the flowers into his chest. he read the tag and his eyes widened.

  
"Oh, fuck..." He said.

  
"You fucking well think?!" I shrieked. "What did I tell you about the grandkids of fucking IRA tradies?!" I aimed a slap at Pat's head and got him over the forehead. Ethan told me to stop and I thought about clocking him, but within a instance Pat's arse in his black shorts was riding away on his bike into the distance, and Ethan looked pale.

  
"What do we do?" Ethan asked me.

  
"We can't take them back." I said to him even though I wanted to. "We either bin them or you get a train the next morning to the village, walk to the cemetry, and figure out which grave these belonged to."

  
Ethan and I had no choice but to bin them.

  
"Me and Dad were home having dinner and suddenly Pat turns up saying he's going to do this and is going to do that. And he had the fucking flowers." Ethan sat at the kitchen table; I fetched a coke out of the fridge for him. He cracked the top on it gratefully. "What the hell do I tell Dad?" he said after a few gulps.

  
"Just say Teag liked her flowers." I replied. "Don't stress, chook."

  
Ethan smiled a bit. "You're cool. Pat's right. You're a funny little thing."

  
"Pat needs his head shoved up his arse." I remarked. Ethan conceded the fact, and his chest jumped with a laugh.


	16. Barn In The Back Garden

Love. It hurts.

  
I looked out through the window in my bedroom. The sky was thickly cloudy and grey. If it had been blue and shining I would have gone ballistic.

  
The agony in love is truly profound. Loathsome fucking thing, that pain. You wish for it to be simply, but it's never just that simple isn't it?

  
Once you get touch, once you get held...you become a wildfire of desire and of frustrated, agonizing rage when you then next receive it, or you don't. Been made to wait is said to be sexy. As described. But it's not. Been made to wait gives you the feeling of your veins burning to ash beneath your skin; itchy and frustrating, you can't do anything about it apart from just simmer and burn, like rum on a fire.

  
It's torture.

  
And no matter how many times I listen to the Divinyl's, my problems don't just get solved.

\--------------------------------

"I thought you had a job?" I said to Ethan. He was leaning with his elbows on the counter in the shop/gallery. A few old ladies and a young woman were viewing gaments and fingering the fabrics with clean fingers and coloured nail polish.

  
"Dad sent me around here." Ethan replied.

  
"My dad said he'll come around and mow the lawn." I implored. I knew that his Dad was trying to make some business out of me.

  
"This letter from the council was in your mailbox." Ethan pulled a letter out of the pocket of his shorts; it was folded and crumpled, but it didn't matter. I tore it up into little pieces and let it fall into a mess on my side of the counter.

  
"They're a bunch of cunts and can fuck off." I heard some of the old ladies chuckle a laugh. Ethan smiled for a moment.

  
"Do you know how to use a lawn-mower?" He asked me. I crossed my arms, and even though I didn't intend for it to happen, it hoisted my breasts up in the sweetheart neck-line linen dress.

  
"Yes I do, and your Dad's a sweetheart for having the consideration, but it's sorted." I said.

  
"It's only £25 for an hour's worth of work. Just let me do it." Ethan put to me.

  
"Dad'll go ballistic, but you can come around and put up with it while I lock myself into the airing cupboard." I went over to the till in my shop even though there were people browsing and I pulled out some notes for Ethan. "Tell your Dad that he's got a nice trick going but I know what he's doing. If you need a piss or a drink, you know where to find it." I smiled as an old lady inquired about peasant trousers and Ethan went out to the barn.

  
An hour later the grass had been mowed, the trees were pruned, and there were a few bin-liners full of the lawn catching's, dead flower-heads, and over-grown tree branches that were sawn up neatly. Ethan was lying on pallet crates in the barn, drinking one of the bottles of ice tea I had in the fridge.

  
"Dad always said this stuff tasted like shit, so I thought I'd give it a go." Ethan said. I nodded. I was suddenly thirsty for some of the tea, but I didn't get the bottle off him. I sat on a spare crate with him in silence. We weren't doing anything. I didn't feel like a smoke.

  
"Even though your Dad's doing business, thanks so much for doing the garden. It's lovely of you." I said to Ethan. His head tipped to the side weightlessly, looking tired in the Summer heat.

  
"Do you want to come inside? Cool off for a bit?" I asked him. He looked at me funny for a moment.

  
"Nah, I'm fine." He drank some more of the tea, then left, taking the bottle with him.

\----------------------------------

_You fucking moron_ , I thought to myself. _Of course he wouldn't get it. Of course he wouldn't - you were only been nice but he must have thought you were coming onto him and with the pissing in the bushes the incident the other week - you deadshit!_

  
I sat up straight as a knock sounded on the back door. Someone had to hop the fence to do that. I crept into the kitchen and grabbed a knife, before looking out the window to see Gemma's familiar head of black hair. She was dressed up in a sleeve-less black dress and small heeled shoes. I put the knife back in it's block and went downstairs. I was just running around in a white shirt.

  
Her eyes glistened. I noticed her eyeliner was smudged. "The Labour government lost the British election." She whispered to me. I stood up on my toes and she bent over to accommodate me been five inches shorter than her. Pressed against the doorway, we kissed madly.


	17. Swimming At Dawn

I had a dream at about four 'o' clock in the morning.

I went down to the reservoir a-hundred-and-fifty meters from my house and swam. The sky was clean, soft spectrums of navy and the beginnings of the dawn. Along the finest millimeter edges of the horizon were a otherwordly teal-silver; stars in their hundreds of millions form sparkled in the clear sky above. The water was dark and dangerous; impossible to see beneath the surface. You could have been swimming in ink. The valley that the reservoir was built into amongst the highlands were illuminated, even though the moon's light didn't reall seem to touch the ground or work to make anything on the Earth glow. I wasn't cold, but I wasn't warm. I was warm inside, but I was scared. Not fear as such; just the vulnerability of been by myself naked in waters I techinically shouldn't be swimming in before the sun had come up. As the sun came up the water's and my wet skin were transformed into shades of blue and silver, pink and gold. Wet black hair and skin shining like diamonds and white teeth like the lights in the railway underpass where adolescents years ago got into the fashion of balancing on the metal rails in Doc Martens, skinny jeans, and tongue piercings. I imagined as I swam and floated and twisted gravitlessly beneath the surface of the water that somebody was holding onto me to keep themselves afloat because they couldn't quite swim, and the meters below and around me were out of their depth. Gemma - not like Gemma - Ethan...a enduring love of mine. James. But the version of him when he was thirteen years old and skinny, with his long black hair and monolid eyes from his Chinese Mother, and he had had a tiny length.

\-------------------------------------

I woke up again at half-past nine. I opened up the gallery and the shop while a kettle boiled upstairs. Tourists and fisherman in the area took photos of the water and of the highlands and of my dew-drenched garden; people came inside and bought clothes and asked about paintings. Talk, talk, talk. English breakfast tea, green tea, lemon and lime tea. Knew I should eat an apple but went slowly through a chocolate chip biscuit instead. Took people's money. They took my clothes. A mix-raced couple walked hand in hand down the path to my building from their car; he was tall, dark-haired with a close-cut beard and quitessentially Anglo-Saxon. Duffle coat, jeans, converse sneakers. His girl was a Japanese girl with her head coming to his shoulder; scruffed-up denim mini skirt, whit long-sleeved top, a pretty face. They were underneath an umbrella. It was spitting rain, and the sky was beautiful over-cast and silver. I was happy. They looked so you together. They looked like they belonged together. He put his arm around her, and she leant her head against his shoulder, fitting perfectly into his side. It wet my eyes and I had to duck down behind the counter and pretend I was checking through boxes. 

  
A Greek lady asked if she and her small two-year-old daughter could have some of the wild strawberries, blackberries and raspberries that grew on vines in the open courtyard garden. I fetched a bowl for them and told them where the outdoor tap was if they wanted to rinse off any potentially lurking aphids. I read a Danish book and had Tom Jones playing on vinyl. This is a naturalism to me. I'm not a hippy, I'm not indie, I'm not hipster. I'm Teagan Hughes.

  
Ethan swanned through the door with a concoction in Tupperware he called "ginger cake". I couldn't believe he had come looking for me because he actually wanted to see me; fates of the home-schooled young women of the world. This "ginger cake" had walnuts, almonds, candied orange peel, and buttercream icing. His Dad's girlfriend had cooked it but he and his Dad didn't really eat stuff like that. Ethan ate some with me though; I conned him into it. People in the shop/gallery looked over and smiled at the sweet scene; I felt like climbing up onto the counter and shouting out, "I know, I know, I know! Isn't it absolutely fucking fabulous?! It's absolutely aaammmaaazzziiinnngggg!!!"

  
Ethan got exactly how I felt.

  
He suggested we drive to a village called Woodend and buy fish from a butcher in the black forest. My heart and stomach backflipped many times. I dealt with a few more customers until all of them were shepparded out, some with wallets lighter than a few minutes ago. I grinned open-mouth at an old lady who squeezed my hip and smiled at me over Ethan. As I locked up I danced in the shop like I was having a seizure - wild and fluorescent in the silver light coming through the clouds and windows - before straightening the tartan skirt I had on and climbing into Ethan's Volkswagen. He promised to get a non-German car. He understood how I felt when I had to get into that thing; my Dad had drilled into me a lot of anti-German things as a child.

  
On the first stretch we were silent, but as we approached the avenue of honour - a kilometer long series of rural road with towering century-old acorn trees to commemorate Woodend-locals who were killed fighting in France at the Somme in World War One - Ethan pulled over, put the handbrake on, and just looked at me. I think Ethan thought I was upset. I started to laugh with every fibre of my being, and I didn't care that I was crying in front of Ethan, too. We bought a huge piece of whiting from the fishmongers next to a 19th Century government and council chambers that had been made into an art gallery that inspired me when I went in there with my Mum when I was four-years-old.

\------------------------------

Pat furtively slunked around my gallery; he was still in shock of my property and he knew that I could get nasty. It wasn't as though it wasn't warranted; he pinched roses out of a flipping cemetary. I told Gemma; she was apalled but she had nearly pissed herself laughing. While Pat and Ethan were downstairs - I told both Ethan and Pat that I didn't want them turning up with their mates in my property for the sole purpose of I'm the head honcho around here - talking whatever boys talked about. Blowjobs, probably, if knowing Pat's head well enough. I was on cloud nine, hand soaping up Gemma's bare breasts that were just above the surface of the bath water. I was wearing my painting apron, and I had a cigarette stuck in my mouth. Gemma had also laughed herself silly over that, so now it was balancing on the rack where the soap went. I checked on the boys over the top of the stairs as I heard a thump. He and Ethan were head-slamming Vodka and Cognac shots with Pat's crash helmet and a straw creation with silk roses around the brim that I had decorated in the Spring. Gemma ran more hot water into the bath and she let me play with her while I nuzzled her neck and my mouth went over her chest to the skin in-between her breasts. 

  
I cooked for them all. I put it down flat to the boys: "You're fucking idiots for getting uncomfortable over the fact that I'm happy to cook for you. Just because I'm your age and other girls don't do this stuff, doesn't mean I don't. You know I'm not like any other woman. If you sulk, you can fuck off, if not, get full bellies." Gemma sat on the steps at the bottom of the stairs in a white cotton t-shirt and denim shorts while I dictated. 

  
The eggs were fresh, their shells the same skin tone of Gemma's skin. Big knob of butter into the pan, lots of coarsely ground pepper and coarse salt. A pinch of curry powder. Stir as to not make it into a omelette. Turn off the heat while the eggs still glistened. Seasoned bacon, toasted sandwiches which were spinach, chilli, fresh mozzarella. Peasant food; cheap, filling, making the people in the kitchen laugh and smile. They all thought I was going to just put some crisps into a bowl with a couple blocks of chocolate and a few bottles of coke.

  
"Everything under control, Teag?" Pat said to me. I nodded. 

  
"I can cook. Most women - bitches - can't." Pat laughed at my response. Here I was running around in a tartan mini-skirt, a blue and white striped long-sleeved top, and a latte-coloured crocheted jumper. The boys hovered in the background as Gemma suggested we take it outside to the courtyard. I carried plates on my arms and head and Ethan filmed on his phone.


	18. Cages

Even though it was lovely seeing them, I was tired. I opened up the shop at five 'o' clock in the morning. I laid down on my serving counter in my knickers and a shirt and looked at the lights of my building while it was shades of blue and black outside. Gemma would have stayed the night but she knew I was getting tatchy; I snarked at Pat when he made a comment about a scrape about a inch long on the ceiling of my bedroom. Ethan and him had gone on a bit of a tour while I watered the garden and Gemma flicked through the channels on the TV for something to watch. I felt like the leader of an army, having them around. I wanted to go and swim, but something held me. I sort of wanted someone around but I didn't. It would have just been a hinderance. I listened to Jason Durelo on my laptop, and knew that I'd be passing out by eleven 'o' clock in the morning.

  
As the clocked ticked over to half-five "Stockholm Syndrome" by One Direction was playing on repeat. 

  
I never trapped anyone up in a cage. But I wondered if other people thought I did that to myself.

\---------------------------------

I think the concept of free love is bullshit. Because when it comes down to the crunch, we're human beings and we're animals. We get upset, we cry, we get jealous, we get sick inside. To live that reality of the concept where you can't be with another person entirely because everything is loose - it develops a retardion in the body which can only be soothed by drugs, spliffs, and three glasses of red wine before you get onto the whiskey.

  
And you know by now that I hate hippies.

  
I knew Ethan wasn't much of a reader - really - but he did from time to time. I think it disturbed him slightly - or he told Pat and Pat was disturbed by it and then unleashed his opinion on Ethan - that when it came to me he was welcome to chill out all day upstairs in my building or downstairs on the couch, doing whatever he wants, raiding the fridge, masturbating to death in front of the xbox he'd bring from his own house. He's welcome to do whatever he wants.


	19. Gemma On Me

_And I want it_

  
_It's a crime_

  
_That she's not around most of the time_

I really wanted her. I couldn't help it. It was something. In the whole world there is a "something". We all get it from time to time. Along with Gemma came a "something". A something isn't defined by human nature or love or other feelings or human acts. It's just a "something". Invisible, weightless, into it hits you. This "something" makes you gaze so softly at a person that you suddenly say, "I think I love you", with no awareness of your heartbeat, just the breath you exhaled from your mouth as you spoke those words.  
Sure, she came around and she stayed. Sometimes I touched her. Sometimes I wasn't suddenly hit by the fact that she made the effort to search me out to come and see me; I couldn't get that. I still can't get that, sometimes.

  
I think she's got a boyfriend somewhere.

  
She's got a boyfriend, anyway. Suppose she has a boyfriend anyway?

  
She's got a boyfriend, anyway

  
Except I couldn't...I just can't. Either way, it's a fucking mess. 

  
There was black and dark brown soap grime caught around the edges of the bathtub when I filled it up this morning. I floated in there for a long time; the grime had worked in a way that the name "Lora" was written on the ceramic. The grime worked itself in shapes and movements like capital "L - O - R - N - A".

  
Maybe that's something, I thought. Lora. Maybe that's her name. If I'm going to end up with someone or get hitches or otherwise get settled, maybe it's with Lorna.

  
I wish she'd come and see me and decide I was the answer to everything and stay around with me. Maybe she already did that, and I didn't realize.

\----------------------------------

Every girl knows the ordeal of having bad skin when you've got a desperately eery "something" hanging about in the air. It's the question of fate; will that person come along while I look intensely undesirable, or will I just lose it and make a mess of things at some point?

  
No one wants to get lost in a love. No one wants to get lost thinking about a love, either. But we all fucking do, don't we?

  
I solely blame Gemma for my smoking addiction, if it comes to that. Transparently ugly. Hopeless. Individualistic. A recipe for nocturnal disaster. That sounds pretty doesn't it? For the blinder side and the brighter side.

  
Ethan slipped down the quayside at the reservoir and sprained his ankle; it bloomed colours of red and mauve, pink and mustard, blue and black and purple as it swelled up gingerly. We had to call his Dad. He wasn't very impressed, I have to say. I don't think it was directed at me, but he made a comment to Ethan about showing off. I said to Ethan's did that it was just a freak accident, and we're sorry for having to trouble him. Ethan's Dad grumbled a bit, and I felt flames lick up my bones beneath my skin. _Ignorant cunt_ , I thought. _Why don't you worry about your child? It's not like I fucking well shoved him off the lane, you total fucking wanker_

  
Ethan sent Pat a picture of his ankle. He told me later on when we were texting and he was back from the hospital. He had to get stiffened bandages put on and a morphine shot. Plus a set of crutches. I didn't really know what to think. I wasn't very impressed. I had a craving for strong English Breakfast tea with two sugars in it. I smoked a lot, and I drank a lot of tea, sitting on my bed. After the reservoir ordeal I sold two canvases; one was a graphite sketch with nude-toned shading of an old man I made to look a bit like Billy Conally coming a cropper in his hallway through the front door because he was the drunk. The second canvas was a nude woman's body, drawn from the back; the character was walking. To me, the character's face was Gemma's, but there was no face for the purchaser to see. Money in the till. Money in my wallet. Money for the bills. Lovely jubbly.

  
I wondered if Gemma would suddenly walk through the door. I didn't expect her to collapse down on her knees either and propose to me and say she'll kill herself if I don't accept her hand and sapphires in marriage (I love sapphires. Why have boring old diamonds when you can have sapphires?). But I just wondered if she'd come in. 

\----------------------------------

Gemma burned her hand on a hot fryingpan above her stove in her own house when she got into a blue with her boyfriend. Someone had made a comment, and had been making comments. Her mouth and her eyes and her face looked so pretty framed by her straight curtains of hair as she whimpered from the pain. Because she did the exact same thing at my house. She went to open the door to the shop/gallery with the hand she had hurt. She hadn't run it under cold water or bandaged it. The right side of her face was still black and blue.

  
"Silly bugger." I kissed the palm of her hand before putting the past on it that I used for her face; the paste for bruises was made from eucalyptus leaves, but the paste for burns was made from finely ground acorns, aloe-vera gel, and peppermint oil. She yawned hugely as I finished wrapping-up her hand. "All of the things we're taking..." I began half lost in my own thoughts at the sight of her and the silence in-between us and her bandaged hand. "...Cause we are young and we are sick." I finished a few moments later. 


	20. Matters Of Flowers

"You look..." Ethan began.

  
"Shut up." I said to him, still half asleep, still half out of it. "I don't want to hear it. Just shut up."

  
"Have you been sick recently?" Ethan's brow furrowed. I raised an eyebrow at him drily, reaching down to the floor to pick up a box. "It's just that you look pregnant."

\------------------------------------

When a guy friend says that you know you're in trouble. Girls bloat for a couple of reasons:

  
⦁ Menstrual-related

  
⦁ Diet issues

  
⦁ Pregnancy

  
⦁ Cervical Cancer

  
And, as far as I went, it wasn't the first three. And I really fucking hoped it was the first four. If you're a woman, by the time you're fourteen you can work out if you're going to have cervical troubles later on in life. If you don't figure it out yourself, your first boyfriend will come and quip to you, "Why do you have a testicle inside you?"

  
Great, thanks mate

  
"Ok...." I straightened up and pointed at him. I sort of wanted to laugh but I was in a bad mood so it would have frightened the balls of the poor boy. "I am not up the fucking duff. Last time I checked two natural women can't get each other pregnant, and as far as sex goes I get fuck all; I don't know what you think I get, but the answer is three percent less than a troll."

  
"Hang on, hang on, what?" Ethan frowned at me. I groaned suddenly and had to hold onto the counter. For a second after straightening up I did feel like I was having a baby.   
"What are you fucking on about?" I said to him.

  
"Girl sex - the fuck?"

  
"Remember Gemma? The Chinese girl with the thigh-gap and the nice tits and the long black hair?" I said. Ethan went quiet for a bit; you could tell he wasn't quite like other boys who probably would have exclaimed aloud some swear-words or something.

  
"You seem very sad." He confided to me his opinion. "Like something's really wrong but you just won't say."

  
"Oh, love....no, no, no. Honey, hey." I leant against the counter. "Let's put the kettle on otherwise I'll be sick everywhere." I made two mugs of tea that way I like it; no milk, strong black tea, two teaspoons of sugar.

  
"I'm happier than I've ever been. Truly. I'm indepentant, I'm rich, I'm a moderately successful artist, writer, painter, etc." I gestured around. "All of this is mine." I sighed. "I see you guys. Gemma, you, stupid fucking Pat - daft old Pat."

  
"You ever gonna get over that?"

  
"I'm not angry, Ethan."

  
"The swearing I mean, over Pat."

  
I stared down at the empty mug. I had drunk the tea as quickly as we could. "Those were the first flowers I ever had." I told Ethan. "And he pinched them off someone's poor bloody grave."

  
"Oh." - "Seriously? First time for flowers were that one?"

  
I nodded.

  
"Surely someone's given you flowers before?"

  
I shook my head. Ethan looked down at his mug. "Nice tea, Teag." He said.

  
"Hmm." After he finished I washed them out in the sink and he stayed at the kitchen table.

  
"Why's no one given you flowers before?"

  
"BECAUSE THEY JUST FUCKING HAVEN'T, YOU IRRITATING POMMY CUNT!" I roared at the window out to the garden, banging my hands down on the bench and the sink edge. After a little bit I turned around, and I saw Ethan was gone. No wonder. I'd probably terrified the poor bastard. I sat down at the table and I started crying. Every-time I had to go out of my way to fuck things up.

\-----------------------------------

I had a dream that Ethan's Dad came around with huge wreath of flowers for me from Ethan.

  
God it's going to be a shit Yuletide, I thought. I'll have dinner with Nanna, that'll be the best part. My Dad and sister will be there, and thats that. Come home...watch Tim Burton films. And the other favourites; "The Danish Girl", "Submarine"...

  
I hadn't been able to buy anything either. I didn't want for anything, neither did my sister or my Dad. My nanna had brought a handbag and we had wrapped that up for her. That was that.

  
You know how I'll be spending Yuletide night? Listening to James Blunt, writing, painting, and screaming through the roof to the Goddess before remembering I am independent, I am rich, I am moderately successful, I have got Ethan, Gemma and stupid fucking Pat, before I go full circle again and lost my rag over the graveyard flowers incident again and how I missed out on everything that everyone else had as a adolescent, even though when I saw them having it I would just sneer and think, "Retards", superiorly. 

  
I remember once I was in a dentists office with my Father; I was flicking through a Vogue magazine and pointing out the Dolce and Gabbana plus the Balenciaga Spring/Summer collections to my father and talking about markets and hem-lines, while three kids my age played with baby toys on the floor on the other side of the room.

  
Fucking grace, isn't it?


	21. Flowers In December

I stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom. 

  
I felt like shit. I thought about things. Execution - either public hanging or public beheading - for all rapists, paedophiles, human traffickers. How the UK should have a Labour government instead of a Tory one. Whether or not I'll ever get married. Whether or not I'll ever have a decent sex life.  
I lit up a cigarette.

  
Modern luxury, I suppose, really? There was once a South-Korean model called Daul Kim. She hung ehrself in the sitting room of her Paris apartment ten years ago. She would have been thirty years old this year if she was still alive. She was a artist and writer as well as a international supermodel. She once wrote on her blog in 2008, "Depression and boredom is luxury / And it is our Mother and our Father / And it is repetition / Why bother to escape your fate / What you were born into / Why you suffer your poor self / Everything is a lie / And we can only hope that there is something / Out there 

The last time we thought it was the last and final / And it wasn't / And it won't be / We will have affairs / And we will be bored / We will envy others / Who will envy us / We will all be jealous and ugly / And then we will be bored / It is repetition

And I am a fool / It is our mothers and our fathers / And we will become mothers and fathers / And our children will follow / And the comfort will last if we are lucky currency wise / But the boredom will follow anyhow."

  
Maybe I'm disturbed. Maybe I'm lonely. Maybe I'm fucked-up and a disaster. Maybe the cigarettes do it to me. I'm not much of a drinker. I don't like sherry.

  
So what are dreams for? I'll need them if love doesn't last long; Gemma and Ethan and stupid fucking Irish Pat can run around infinite in my head. 


	22. Instagram

I scrolled through Gemma's instagram; I found videos she had posted back in 2013 of her dancing ballet in a timber floor training room in a converted Catholic-Church to Academy in a nearby village from the one where we were located. When I was five and six I had done ballet at the same academy. It's what little girls do. The sight made me howl internally. I put my phone face down on the duvet so I didn't have to see it anymore and I just thought to myself, "Die, die, die, die, die, just - fucking - die."

\------------------------------

Gemma has a piano. I walked past her house and I could hear her playing it. I could have knocked on the door, wandered into the back garden, called through the letter-box in the black-painted door.

  
I felt like I would be an intruder if I did such a thing. I felt like a creep just standing there. Her piano was at the back of her house just off the kitchen. She couldn't see me. I held the belief that either way she didn't really give a fuck anyway. I was just a foolish little bitch.

  
The piano was so loud that it began to irritate my head. I walked away, and suddenly had the urge to kick the mailbox.

  
I quickly scribbled a note in Welsh and stuffed it halfway into the letterbox. Ten seconds later I walked back up the footpath, took it out, and lit a match. I burnt the paper and it's _Cymraeg_ words into ashes on her welcome mat.

  
 _Why can't she just..._ I didn't know what I wanted, so much that I couldn't even finish my own thoughts.

  
Daul Kim wrote something else as well. "Never had I been so acutely aware of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Never had it crossed my mind so intensely that it is merely myself camouflaging myself."

  
Love and relationships...my love and relationships. I'm still waiting to get it right.

  
Really depressive shit this is, right? You're wondering where the story is, yeah? Don't know. Maybe I'll cap it off someday. A lot of it is just shit, anyway

  
The main points right now are that I'm jealous and that I don't trust. Fuck, that's gorgeous, isn't it?


	23. Pink Walk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things come about for a change

"Fuck!" Ethan saw my car. I clicked my tongue at him.

  
"Out the way, boy, I need to get it out of the barn." I said. He'd begun to hang around a lot since the "flowers" incident and me calling him a pommy cunt in the kitchen. I had to think about it and remind myself that he liked me, he was doing this because he liked me, he was worried about me - he had expressed this - and he knew more often than not I was ready to put my fist through Pat's skull. I think Pat was always out of his depth at my place, anyway.

  
What-fucking-ever.

  
Ethan wanted to know if he could have a drive of the Rolls Royce. When I showed him it had five pedals, he backed off the idea.

  
"Plan today?" he said to me as we began to drive down the road.

  
"Narcissism." I responded, as I changed through gears manually.

  
"What?"

  
"A wee bit of self-promotion." I laughed. "Wait until you see, it's so cool."

  
What I had secured was the two storey exposed wall of a dressmakers, available for the whole south of the street to see because of a series of 1950's cottages built next to it on the corner of one of the block in the long street which opened up the whole side. It was formally painted with the names of Victorian-era and Edwardian-era businesses and families that had had companies in that street. Except, now, I got to paint it white - along with anything I fucking well wanted. A mural, you could say. And I was going to make it extremely foul. As a part of the mural, I was going to paint up there, "This town is full of cunts, and this country is the Earth's arsehole; it procures shit."

  
I hate Australia. I told Ethan. First he pissed himself laughing, then he realized I was serious; his mouth and eyes went to the shape of tea-saucers. Afterwards, when he realised just how serious I was, he went very quiet.

  
"Someone will stab your car tyres." He said to me. "You're be arrested for inciting hate."

  
"I'll be arrested when Donald Trump starts shitting bricks." I replied to Ethan. "Let the fucks try." I laughed, and that absolutely terrified the poor guy. Scaffolding had been set up at my wall, and I saw the bed and breakfast owners looking shitty. They came over and I just told them to fuck off.

  
"We won't be talked to like that!" They insisted. I told them some stuff I can't publish here. They threatened to have my project canceled. I said I have no problems with pouring fast-setting liquid concrete into their storm water and sewage pipes. All the while Ethan stood a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the ground.   
I got on quite well with the lady who owned the building I was painting up; she brought out the paper and in it was a few lines about "exciting young artists bring glamour and beauty and aesthetic scope to the country community".

  
"All of this town are a bunch of cunts." I lit up a smoke for me and her. "I'm not being nice. One example: why would I be nice - as a pagan - to Neo-Nazi's and Catholics?"  
The dressmaker burst out laughing. She was a lady in her early sixties with a taste of lavender, bubblegum pink, blue, and bright yellow clothes with shades of silver and white thrown in.

  
"The only thing I like about this cuntville is that it looks like home in the UK." I kissed the dressmaker cheek, and then pulled on my linen apron, and got to work with a tin of white paint. Yep. I'm doing it all by hand and all by myself; anyone and anything else can fuck off, get fucked otherwise, or just simply fuck itself. The council fuckheads don't come into it. A lady wants me to paint up the bricks of a building she owns, paid for in cash, and pays tax and land rates on each year. We do whatever we want. Anyone turns up having a sook, out come the guns. My Father and Gramdfather used to collect these beautiful English and Russian made things from the World Wars - both the first and second.

  
I'm not a quiet-spoken woman.

  
And there's no such thing as a quiet village; the hierachy, religeous control and abuse, the bent business dealings and tax evation plus other financial fraud - plus the adultery, incest (all of this is true), lack of morality in general and general scandals...and everyone pretends it doesn't happen and the town is such a nice place. They pretend everything is sweet while they backstab each other and suck up each other's arse.

  
Or, it's a case of the typical Australians; they're ignorant pigs who have no idea about anything.

  
"You're gonna cause a really big problem." Ethan said to me. He had wandered off to the other side of town and had got Subway for lunch. I don't eat that shit; the people who own it are cunts.

  
"Don't you know my name and old men sweetheart?" I replied. "We've always been fucking notorious. And we don't take shit off people who are bent, incestuous, infidel, catholic, neo-nazi, or otherwise a -"

  
Ethan nodded sharply. I wondered if in that moment I had really shaken him up.

  
"You ok, chicikita?" I asked him. He nodded again, drinking lemonade. A few minutes he got up and he was helping paint the bricks white. The wall was to be two layers of white paint and then jet black like my and Gemma's hair and eyes. There are lots of things to be painted on that wall that observes the hisotry of the town; the children sexually abused in the catholic church, the tax fraud made by a car-dealership, the incest of the baptist ministers children and other families, the local Neo-Nazi movement. It was going to be all under cover into the last inch was finished.

  
I wanted to paint Gemma in as the Goddess. To any of the catholics, baptists, anglicans, prysbetarians, nazi's, bhuddists and muslims in the town - who were they to say the Goddess didn't have the face of a Chinese woman? But I know better; the Goddess was a Indigenous Cymry woman of the homeland, Wales. I don't think she knew Chinese people existed as a race back when she lived in the 1300's in North Wales. But, who knows? The world has always been as the world has been. This process continues on, even to this very second. Every one of your breaths and heartbeats; every one of my breaths and heartbeats.

  
Who do I love more? Gemma or the Goddess? I tell Gemma I love her but it's the Goddess I made the vow to. I've proof for how the Goddess is much more capable or fucking me and my life up than Gemma is. 

  
What's the point of doing all this? You might ask. You'll just be attacked and caught up in return.

  
Australian's are piss weak. They don't do a thing. Welsh are vicious; we always have been. The women, the men. And here in a lawless place you've got a punch of immigrants and convicts. Australians are fuckheads. All they could do is have their mouth turned into the funny shape every single time they lay eyes on my art.  
Hozier once said all music is political. Well, sometimes, art is too.

\---------------------------------

Gemma's face had healed up slowly, as had her hand; her hand had healed fastest, virtually overnight. "You know the dressmakers at the end of town?" I told her. We were in a cafe together in a village in the black forest.

  
"Hmm?" Gemma said through a mouthful of English Breakfast tea.

  
"The lady who owns it has agreed to me painting a mural on the side of her wall of the building. It's the dressmakers next to the bed and breakfast - those 1950's cottages? the dressmaker's garden backs onto St Pauls with all the birch trees."

  
"What are you going to paint?"

  
Gemma recoiled as I smiled darkly. She got all her answer in that smirk. I had big plans for this project. And nobody had a right to know or to fucking mess with it.  
"I'm getting my own back on the vermin in this place. And, babi, am I doing it in style." I became "Human" again, and squeezed her hand, before giving a estate agent the finger and throwing a mug at his head as he made a comment about lesbians.

  
No one had the indecency to have me arrested by calling the pigs - sorry, coppers.


	24. Infinity

All human beings have an infinity with concious life that we cannot truly behold ourselves yet we exert pressures and dreams and dedications to enhance this intuition from dreams, and from ourselves, concious desire to make another degree of conciousness that further brings us into another state of conciousness. Infinity has an apparel which astounds us because we think we have it cracked, we think we have it understood. Our nature has humans fucks infinity. infinity is something never ceasing, something constantly moving. And we don't. We die.


	25. Dancing To Kodaline

"But if you loved me, why'd you leave me? Take my body, take my body..."

  
Gemma laughed; we were dancing in her sitting room to Kodaline. The main problem with me is that I'm a total shortarse. She's 5 foot 9, 5 foot 10 and I'm 5 foot 5, or, shit, I think I'm smaller. 5 foot 4. I had put on a pair of her high-heels from her wardrobe to accommodate the height difference, but I crashed over the couch because my little feet swam in the shoes. I had done my hair so it looked like hers; centre-parted and straight. Most women look beautiful like this; I get this feeling that whenever I look in the mirror with this hair - even though I want it - it is the 1970's and I'm one of Charles Manson's girls. I told Gemma this. She went "Oh, God!" and just about pissed herself laughing.  
I've got a favourite olive coloured skirt that I layer shorter dresses and tops over; today it was a sleeves, low-necked flower-printed black dress with Germanic-style lacing at the front that could make the waist at the front come up higher and reveal more of my cleavage. I didn't like it been knee-length, so I wore it like a top.

  
I could have danced the chumba-wumba when Gemma told me she thought it looked great; very swish. 

  
"It's going to be very hot today." She said.

  
"I can't believe I woke up at half-seven considering I spent most of the night thrashing about in my knickers in the dark and then having to get my blankets at three or four because suddenly it was freezing." I replied.

  
"Don't you have air conditioning at home?"

  
"Well...I've lost the bloody remote, haven't I?"

  
"Oh, Teagan."

  
"Ah, I know. Silly old bear."

  
"Are you excited for Christmas?"

  
"It'll be cool; lovely and feel and swish."

  
"I read that Billy Conally book you told me about?"

  
"Oh, yeah? What'd you think?"

  
"He's a bit like you and your Dad."

  
I laughed. "We're all a bit similar; Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English. You'll always have those personalities; it comes with been of those indigenous. The loveable cantankerousness, the Eira personalities."

  
"Eira?"

  
"Winter. Eira means snow, winter." I explained. "You remind me of the Eira."

  
"I'm not cold."

  
"No. You're beautiful. You're my favourite season."

  
Gemma smiled.

  
"You look so cool." As we waltz around just to ourselves in the sitting room, I squeezed her hand.

  
"Let's get some shoes to suddenly fit you." Gemma said.

  
"Oh, these ones are nice." I pointed to a pair of jet black boots that came halfway up your calve; around the top they had a thin white and red stripe and I thought they were cool. There were another set of shoes that were heels with a thin strap around the ankle and a lin that went across the top of your foot to the toe from the strip around your ankle. She also had a pair of crocodile-skin sandals with a triangle shaped heel and criss-cross leather across the top of the foot. Gemma chuckled. I put them on and tried to give as graceful a turn as I could.

  
I'm never going to come to misery.

  
Gemma started talking to me about that mural. I grinned; I felt quite menacing over that.

  
"I got the first coat of black on today." I told her. I was even forbidding her from coming behind the sheeting and the scaffold before the mural was finished. She seemed quite content and excited about this development. Maybe I'm just a cold-hearted bitch, or maybe it's what been the artist of the mural is. I'm quite candid over the whole thing.  
It's nearly finished, anyway.


	26. Hair

"When your hair gets a bit longer we're going to go to my hairdresser and get it shaped." Gemma told me. I turned and looked at her; I was sitting in an armchair in her house reading a book with my glasses on and listening to Hozier.

  
You forget what it's like to have a woman when you're in my shoes. My Dad - even when I was younger - would never had made a comment like that.

  
"Ok." I reasoned. "I want to grow it out, though. Long like Cymry merch."

  
"What?" Gemma laughed at my Welsh. I put my book and glasses on the floor as she came over and sat in my lap with her back against the wing on the chair beside my head and her legs over the arm of the couch with her bum squarely on my lap.

  
"Welsh girl hair. Long and black and thick like the Goddess Arianrhod." I explained. "Welsh beauty has always been black hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes with pink lips and pink cheekbones. Beautiful and natural." For a moment I pressed my face into the shape of her breasts through her oatmeal-coloured t-shirt. Gemma caught in on the joke and put her long-fingered hands at the back of my head. I accidentally got lipstick on her poor bloody shirt - one I rather liked - but I wouldn't have minded been there for quite a while. I could breathe. Gemma's breasts weren't like mine which look like I have two watermelons stuffed down my top even though I'm thin.

  
Honestly, I think my bum's along the same lines as well. I looked side on in a mirror the other day and frankly - oof!


	27. Green Light

The mural was unveiled. No big scene. No press photographs, no mayor, no council big-wigs, no locals. I unveiled it at half-six in the morning anyhow. The mural itself is in parts; at the very centre is the name of the town with pretty, artistic script with ivy, oak leaves, acorn leaves, and birch painted around the name like a wreath. There's nothing wrong with the name of the town; it's just the people. On the left-hand side are the two most provoactive; they are the first bits you see. At the top we have the Neo-Nazi's; a man and a woman stand with their traditional dress. The woman wears a headband with a flower on it, long loose hair, a covering blouse and a knee-length skirt with stockings, flat-heels, ugly features - all the women are ugly - without a scrap of make-up. The man stands beside her in a button-up shirt, short hair, and tailored trousers. Around them shows white supremacy visions, swastikas, odelrunes and the white robes and hoods their "Priests" wear. Below on the bottom left-hand side is a Catholic priest with a young boy tied up; the priest's body over the child's covers the child's nudity, but his screaming face covered in tears is visible for all to see, along with the bruises on her wrists, chest, face and throat. On the right hand side - on the top right-hand side are incest couples. A naked boy and girl are entwined together, kissing, with a sash across their bodies reading "Brother and Sister". The bottom right hand corner is devoted to reflections of the bent business; black and white cash notes, dodgy paperwork, Freemasons handshakes and smirking mouths full of gold teeth and blank male faces with eyes that's pupils are withing "£" signs. A gun is held to the character's temple. Now...I'm going to have to work through this in stages. Cue Tosca, shall we? Or maybe Tchaikovksy's 1886 overture for Swan lake; the one with the canons.

**"You're Never Going To Get To Heaven": Morning**

Gemma described it to me in such detail that for a few brief minutes she could have been a writer as well. 

  
She was driving through town and took a detour down the side of the Catholic church; if go for fifty meters, you come out at the end of the block; on the west side is St Paul's Cathedral, and on the East side is the bed and breakfast cottages next door to the dressmaker's shop I painted my mural on. Gemma parked her car outside the blue-stone gutters - the Victorians built these gutters two feet deep and wide - of the Church, before walking down the footpath which is cream gravel and sand, covered in pine needles from the Serbian Pine trees that surround St Paul's. St Paul's is really quite a nice church; it's bluestone with stained glass windows and it's Norman style with the turrets and it is four storeys high. Gemma said she nearly fell over as she saw my work. She jogged up the street to get a closer look; she said all the locals - yuppies, hipsters, weirdos, weirdos with fat bums and small children, weirdos with anorexia and small children, plus the scheming estate agents of the town and a few farmers from a near-by village - who open mouthed and gawping as they drove, walked up and down the street, and those who had a view from a few cafes across the street on the other side of the road.

  
After a good couple of minutes Gemma said she ran - literally ran - back to her car and went over the speed limit to get to my place - which is only a tiny amount of kilometers across the North side of another village by the lake - which led to that point I laid eyes on her that morning. 

  
Gemma ran through the front door of my shop/gallery in knee high boots, a denim mini skirt, a white blouse, and her hair down loose. "Teagan!" She shouted out wildly, her arms in front of her as she ran to the counter and - no kidding - she actually crashed into it.

  
"What'd you think, sweetheart?" I asked her five minutes later. I had sat down on the floor beside her, rubbing her back, as she recovered from been winded by my serving counter. She was 5 foot 10 after all, and in ratio to the hide of my counter - bang straight into the ribs. After she got a tiny bit of breath back, she screamed at me. It mostly consisted of "Oh my fucking God! Are you fucking insane! Jesus Christ on a bike - Teagan! Jesus Christ! What have you done?! What have you fucking done?! TEAGAN!!! You'll never get to Heaven."

  
Gemma stared up at me, breathless, more of emotion than from the bruises that would form on her ribs. "You're going to die." She told me matter-of-factly, quite like a drunk person might who you're trying to convince to come home because they've had several lagers, yet, annoyingly, the said person can still stand up straight and talk about Brexit politics. "You will be killed - you will be died. Die. You'll die. I..." She fell from been able to use words. She stared at me, open-mouthed and mute.

  
"Let's have sex." I said to her. "Really rough."

  
Gemma laughed - half high from shock. Nevertheless, we did it on the floor of my shop/gallery with all the curtains and open and doors unlocked where anybody could come in and see two naked women writhing and moaning and touching each other on the floor.

**"Fuck Me Dead, Teag.": Afternoon:**

This time it was my Father, Sister, Grandmother, Ethan's old man and Ethan.

  
"You'll be on the news." Ethan said to me.

  
"As much as I would love that, no." I gazed over at Gemma sitting in a armchair upstairs in my bedroom; her legs were spread open and she was playing with herself, looking at me. "Interviews, yes, but news - no. That just encourages lawsuits."

  
"Who could sue you? You said all the people in the painting had your approval?"

  
"They do." I replied. "And even though the painting is -"

  
"Targeted?" Ethan suggested.

  
"Even though it's personal, it's art. It's not a demonstration, or a protest." I explained.

  
"Everyone's going to explode over this." Ethan said. "About not wanting this in their lovely town -"

  
"Well, this is their lovely town." I scoffed. "The catholics who sexually abuse kids and cover it up, the neo-nazi's, the crooked business people and council - this is this place."

  
"People take it as an attack. Fuck me dead, Teag."

  
"It is an attack. Fuck these cunts. Hey, you know what? I'm going to do another painting."

  
"Jesus, what of?"

  
"Gemma fingering herself in my bedroom. Or maybe just my come of her abdomen and stomach and hands." I said before hanging up. I shoudln't have directed that vileness at Ethan, but, well, I did. Ethan sent me a text a split second later.

  
 _You're the devil_ , it read.

  
"What does your Dad think?" Gemma asked me.

  
"About five different emotions. Daffy Duck when he gets a shock - sort of stuttering, lost for words, but still has the personality. Then he's a bit lost, a bit angry, but mostly he's just...what the fuck has my baby done? I didn't think my baby could - oof!" I imitated him. "Nanna doesn't really know what to say and my sister is just neh-neh-neh. Like I'm a fully grown woman yet my stupid dad comes out giving me lectures on this and then gets the shits when I won't tell him what I'm painting. I told him it would be finished soon."  
Gemma giggled. She didn't really give a fuck what my family thought. "Come here." She rubbed herself up against my thigh. She was really eager since seeing my painting; like it had boosted her libido. Her hair spilt loose everywhere over her face and shoulders and her back and I wanted to take photographs.

  
I will do another painting. And I will paint Gemma. And nothing will happen over that.

  
People will blog, text, photograph, record, video, Instagram, Facebook, twitter, snapchat data of that painting; the context behind it, what it means. That gallery director in Melbourne will come in a few days to officially photograph it and display the photograph in his exclusive premises. Make my heart sing. Make my kiss his cheek which has close-shaven silver whiskers. 

  
My hands and my body have done lots of things. But this is probably the most profound. Despite my Fathers reaction, I was deliriously high and happy and excited on the phone to him. A tummy full of butterflies.

  
"Dad, I've done it! It's all done! You can see it now - all lovely and jubbly and beautiful and done!" I laughed myself silly on the phone. My Dad drove down and saw it. I can't really describe how that went. If he was dead you could say he had turned in his grave and then decided to call up his eldest daughter.

  
This painting isn't devastatingly gorgeous in a lovely 19th century carved frame. It's not even close.


	28. Relationships

"Do you think we can do it?"

  
I breathed out cigarette smoke. "Of course I'm going to get jealous. Of course I'm going to miss you. I guess I can only hope that he gets the same about me if you're going too..."I broke off with a chuckle. It was dry and I felt sick. Typical. Fucking typical. Just absolutely fucking typical, I thought bitterly.

  
"I'm not enough, am I?" I said to her. I picked at the skin on my lower lip. The pain was bright and fresh as I peeled away. Blood was cold and sweet in my mouth. I bit into the raw flesh as Gemma just sat beside me. 

  
"What do you want me to say to that? What do you expect me to say to that?" Gemma replied.

  
I ran my thumb back and forth over my eyebrow. Just say the truth. Whatever you want. Just to her now before everything implodes and it's a fucking mess, my concience told me.

  
"I'm desperate for sex, I'm desperate for you, I'm desperate for sex with you; I want you in my life and I want you to stay around and I get I don't have a penis and you feel things I don't about this." I gestured around vaguely in-between us. "You've literally got no idea how cool I think you are. You look so cool, you are so cool, you've always been so cool. I love you for that. I never wanted to be just your friend, sweetheart. I wanted to kiss your neck."

  
"Of course you're enough, Teagan." Gemma said. "It's just..."

  
"Yeah." I mumbled. "It's just."

  
"I didn't realise you had so much pain in you." She suddenly said. "I just thought it was your personality; that loveliness and that cantankerouness and that viciousness. I just thought it was your personality and you been brought up by a Welsh dad and your mum dying when you were little and just your whole world and the Pagan stuff -" He hands fluttered around her temples. She turned her head to me. All the while she had been speaking to the ground in-between her knees. "I didn't realize you had this much hurt."  
I frowned. "It's not pain. It's not hurt."

  
"It's anger, then."

  
"Of course it is. These sub-human, verminous cunts had shitted and shitted and shitted on my beautiful, lovely family. We do things and we have done things and we are things that nobody else is, nobody else has ever been, and nobody else has ever been. My beautiful family...we've had to deal for decades with this scum." I explained to Gemma. "It's only a mirror, honey." I wrapped my arms around Gemma. Her body was warm and soft. "The incest, the adultery, the infidelity, the Catholics, the Nazi's, the corruption, the backstabbing. This is the world, love." I stroked her face, pulling her back so I could look at her directly. I smiled. "And this is why you're a Queen in Yves Saint Laurent lipstick and your lovely designer clothes and your...your lovely everything." I touched my forehead and nose against hers. Every Indigenous race on the planet has a version of this. The Maori people of New Zealand called it "Hongi". In Pagan Wales, we refer to it as "surrender". "Respect". "Honesty".

  
"Humanism".

  
"And this is why I am queen with a seven figure bank balance, an art gallery, twenty-four acres of land and a lake, and I am Hughes. This is it, love. This is everything. They can't paint over it or demand it be taken down. The Baptists children - brother and sister lovers - they live happily together by themselves in a village at the Black Forest; the children abused by those two priests - the priests are in jail, and the children gave me permission to paint their stories. And the people who tried to steal £4,000,000 from Toyota blamed my Papa, you know?" I chuckled. I was deliriously happy. "The world is as it is. It is has it has always been."

  
Gemma and I lay back down on the grass. A eruption had been made by my hands and that paint I had used to tell those true stories. The eruption had given me the feelings and the soul of the Goddess. Nobody could fuck me up.

  
Gemma and I are queens.


	29. Roger

Apparently I and my work are "revolting, digusting, degrading, abusive, targeting "innocent individuals and happy families", and I have "disgraced this town and mocked it to an unforgiveable extent". Meanwhile, out of the town, myself and my work is "A revelation, a new kind of art, a portrait of something highly political and undeniably controversial despite it being an unvarnished truth of human nature and human life."

  
The art director came back. I had nicknamed him "Roger" because of his likeness to Roger Lloyd-Pack.

  
"You never needed me." He said to me, with his arms crossed. He was smiling. "You never needed my gallery."

  
"You still want to hang that photo?"

  
"How many young women have painted incest, nazi's, corrupt capitalism and child sex abuse committed by the catholic church in one painting?" Roger echoed to me. "There's a sensitivity there, but it's amazing, my dear. It truly is. You've done something no one else does. Any attention?"

  
"Most outrage and write-up on blogs. People say this and say that; it won't be on the news, it won't be -" I gestured around me vaguely. "It's a painting that is a reflection of sickening people in a sickening town." I laughed. "People are outraged! People are offended!" I mocked in a bellowing, male tone, standing up with my hands on my hips. I sat back down to my tea and cigarette. "Well, they can all fuck off." I exhaled my lungful of smoke and pointed the burning tip of the cigarette to Roger.

  
"You're a very electric personality as well." He praised me.

  
"Piss and vinegar, darling; cantankerous, foul-mouthed, interesting sex life. Lots of tea, good food, cigarettes, hand-made clothes, and a healthy bank balance to swim in like Scrooge McDuck." I gave him the philosophy of life. He laughed.

  
"Can i get you something?" I gestured to my mug.

  
"What tea do you have?"

  
"All the tea in the world, Rog. Peppermint, ginger and apple, Early Grey, English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast, Dilmah Black Leaves, Strawberry White Tea, Green Tea and Lemon and Lime tea."

  
"Goodness me."

  
"Just have Te Saesnag Brecwast." I pointed to my mug.

  
"Pardon?"

  
"English Breakfast tea." I translated the Welsh to English.

  
"I want to see more!" Roger exclaimed suddenly.

  
"For fuck's sake, I've got enough tea to fill a cocking cafe, how much more d'you want?!" I shouted in response.

  
"I mean with the painting!" He said. I apologised immediately. "I want to see more focus and attention on it -"

  
"It's only been twenty-four hours, Rog. That's about the time it takes to wipe your arse around here." I told him. "Don't worry; we'll be notorious - yeah, yeah, we. I mean "we". You'll be displaying this fuck-up as well." I pointed to my chin and laughed. "Let's not give a toss about it. Let's go out. Have you seen that new Daniel Craig movie - "Knives Out"? The theatre is about thirty kilometers but there's a good movie theatre."


	30. Reaction

Ethan and Pat were waiting at the edge of the driveway at the back on their bikes beneath one of the Oak trees when I came home from doing the food, wine and cigarette shopping in a neighbouring village in the black forest. I don't like spending money in this town - always been a philosophy of mine.

  
"Hey, you two -" I beckoned Ethan over. "Why wait up here in the heat? You can pop into the barn and that; the fridge in there always runs and it's got coke and lemonade and bitters in there."

  
"Uh..." Ethan looked over his shoulder to Pat. I crunched the Rolls Royce back through it's eighty-seven year old gears and parked it in the barn. Neither of the boys offered to help with the shopping but that suited me fine. 

  
They sat silently in my upstairs kitchen, having got into the house via the fire escape.

  
"What is it?" I said. I think I sounded too harsh.

  
"Why did you paint the stuff about the Church?" Pat asked.

  
"That'd be fucking right." I snarled. "Filthy Irish-fucking-Catholic. You IRA supporter, too?"

  
"It's horrible."

  
"This is what it is. And that boy that is painted beneath that priest is a real man who wanted his story told; he consented to this painting telling of the most traumatic and horrific time of his life, you little cunt. Stand up, and get the fuck out of my house. This is what this filthy institution is - Church, my arse. Too long these poor kids who were raped and abused have been silenced and made to feel like feral animals rolling in blood on the fucking ground. Like it was their fault. Get out!" I punched his chest, pointing to my door. I turned around to Ethan.

  
"You wanna sook too?" I put to Ethan. 

  
"It's really disturbing, Teag."

  
"Pussy!" I howled.

  
"I think it's cool, though." Ethan said. "The business thing, the capitalist thing you made, and the incest thing is weird but -"

  
"What do you expect? They're the kids of a Baptist minister!" I retorted. "Get out of my proeprty if you're going to do this."

  
"Just, why?"

  
"I'm an artist, I painted a fucking painting. I want to give the fucking finger to this town full of vermin catholics, neo-nazi's and crooked business people who shit on my family and backstab each other and blame us!" I yelled. "I hate their guts and I am so fucking proud of my work; they cannot - by law - paint over that, or destroy it. The dressmaker whose building I did it on - she wanted this as well! She made a choice for a property she owns! But that painting is mine! So if someone buys her building one day they buy my art and they cannot destroy my art!"

  
"You don't really realize do you? It was such a big thing that you were doing a painting on the biggest tourist part of the area, and everyone expected something really nice and -"

  
"Why do you suck up the arse of people who hated your Mum's guts and spat at her in the street and refuse to pay your Father for his landscaping work?!"  
Ethan went silent. I realized that he had no idea. 

  
"Here's the history of your family." I put both my hands flat on the table, hunching my shoulders and looking at Ethan. "Your Mum was a devout, fire-and-brimstone Christian girl who organized events for the Church, the nativity, the tea-parties and charity functions, everyone. She voted for the Liberal party and everyone thought she would marry the minister. She met your Dad, and she left them all. You know this, love, eh? But what you don't know si that people would refuse to look at her, serve her in shops. They always take your money around here but not for your Mum. When you were born she had to go to the city hospital because the hospital here insisted they had no rooms or an avaible midwife to take care of your birth. And when your Mum died, the church wouldn't have her buried in their graveyard. This was why she was cremated - despite been Christian - and her ashes are in that lovely urn in your and your Dad's house." I sat down. "When she was about five months along with you, her car broke down. My Dad stopped by in the truck we used to have, gave her a tow and brought her back to you and your Dad's house, because no one would help her and your Dad couldn't help because he was on the other side of the river in the North of the state. Now, my lot don't agree with Christians, but my Dad still goes on to this bloody day about how disgustingly your poor Mum was treated. Everybody talks here, love. Everyone knows. Pat's lot know. Everyone else knows. But they don't say it as in saying it because it makes them apparent for what they are - fucking cunts. Total fucking cunts." I sighed. "This is why I didn't really get at first why you friends with Pat; Pat isn't his parents, but he's their son. And...you know." I gestured around. "It's just that...I know you haven't been raised like me -"

  
"Why..." Ethan halted me. He had sat silent throughout the whole rant about his Mum. "Why do...my family and your family so badly treated?"

  
"We wouldn't take their shit, and your Mum didn't want to exist in this crap either. She wanted your Dad. And she wanted you. She wanted a baby with your Dad and a big old house with a big garden. You're the bub and that house - that's why your house is as it is. You were only little when she went, yeah?"

  
Ethan nodded. He looked a bit wet-eyed.

  
"This is why I go on about Wales and that. And this is why your Dad said I'm my Father's daughter; Grandfather's girl." I smiled a little bit. "This is what it is; as everything is. There's no such thing as a nice little town. That doesn't exist. The smaller a town is the more dark and revolting and scheming it is."

  
"Dad doesn't talk."

  
"It's not because he think you can't handle it. It's because he knows it'd hurt you. Do you want to believe I'm wrong? That I'm just cyncial and cantankerous and violent and nasty?"

  
"You are cynical, cantankerous, violent, and nasty." Ethan gave a silent chuckle; one rise and fall of his chest. He was really upset. He buried his face in his hands.

  
"And another thing." I said. "All artists are cunts."

  
Ethan burst out laughing. His cheeks were bright pink and his eyes were red, making his irises bright and glassy-clear blue. He rocked back in his chair, having hysterics.  
"You're a great fucking example!" He exclaimed, pointing at me briefly.

  
"Sorry, one more thing." I giggled. "All the good girls go to hell 'cause they haven't got souls."

  
"How does this happen?!" Ethan cried out. "You become a bitch, you roar, your upset everyone, you try to beat up Pat, you say about the catholics and the neo-nazi's and then we're here fuckin' laughin'!"


	31. Coppers

I had the Pigs come around - sorry, coppers. I mean Police.

  
A female copper and a male copper come around. I brought them inside the shop/gallery and told them unless they were going to do anything, they were making customers wary.

  
"It's the mural." The male copper. "It's quite a sight."

  
"I agree. As some reported that I've offended them or something."

  
"Not as such. We've come here today -"

  
"Ok, look, I'll take you through it. The Catholic priest and the child; it's a true story. In the 1990's a young boy was raped in the church by a paedophile priest who is now convicted and serving thirty-five years in prison. He'll die in prison. You know this sub-humans name, yes? I know the man personally - the boy who was abused. He's grown up now, and when I said to him about...making this painting, he gave his consent. I've got his contact details if you want to talk to him?"

  
"We're good, thank you." The female copper smiled at me.

  
"And, then, the rest of the painting..." I laughed. "It's not illegal, permit was given by the council, and by the owner of the building. So what do you want?"

  
"This is a small country town."

  
"So what, officer?" I asked drily. "Does the council want to sue me?"

  
"No."

  
"Fuck off." I pointed to my door. 

  
"Don't talk to us like that."

  
"I don't care if the vermin is this place are upset or offended by it. Get off my property, you've no reason to be here. Out! Everyone knows your supervisor is a wife-beater!"

  
That got the pigs out of the shop/gallery.

\-----------------------------------

It's been very exciting. Roger formally took photographs for his gallery, and the Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram of the locals exploded. Many said the scale of the mural - two stories on brick - was astounding, and to actually paint something like that took a great deal of thinking and knowledge. Other's thought the incestuous girl and boy weren't incestuous; they didn't get the "brother sister" reference. People were very silent about the Neo-Nazi and the Catholics. The Neo-Nazi's have always had an interesting relationship with my family; we know what they are and they know that we know. Everyone knows about the paedophile priests, but they all go, "Hush, hus, mustn't do this!" Then they blink and smile retardedly and pray up towards the sky.

  
If the Christian God really exists, I hope somewhere up there he has it in for these cunts.

  
The most interesting part it seemed was the reflection of the corrupted business; a lot of people seemed to find that genuinely quite funny. Photos started to appear of people taking selfies beside the man with the disintegrated "£" pupils and the gun held to his head. 

  
No one dares make comment about the Catholic priest and child; I'd like to see them try.

  
Everybody remember's the boy's photograph and then the face of the grown man he became on the national news when the priest was locked away.

  
I walked down the main street and felt like a God. Every person I saw I just thought, _Fucking try you inbred filth_

  
Gemma's family came down from Melbourne to see the painting. Gemma's sister cried at the sight of the child and the Priest; she and Gemma's Father comforted them by saying that's why he didn't involve them in Church as children. I got into a wonderful conversation with Gemma's parents about the Neo-Nazi's. Gemma's Mother previously hadn't believed we had it in Australia.

  
"Oh, yeah." I smoked. "It's all run by German and Dutch that came here via South Africa after the Second World War. They call themselves the Plymouth Christian Brethren but they refer to themselves as Klan. That's with a "K" by the way. You won't believe it; they use "Klan" as their internet passwords for their businesses. I hacked them with my sister one day."

  
Gemma and her sister nearly had a fit while Gemma's Dad formally adopted me into the family.

  
"That's just Melbourne culture." Gemma's Mum pointed at the businessman. I laughed. "This is beautiful; you should be so proud of yourself." She hugged me, and squeezed my hand. She pointed at the priest and child. "Was he taken care of?" She asked the sexual abuse victim.

  
"Yeah." I nodded. "The guards are nice and rough with him in Prison. The kid's family made money in prison security throughout the 70's and 80's." As realization settled in on all of Gemma's family, her Father chuckled quietly.

  
"Three times a week as a rule." I smiled nastily. The next thing I knew I was inviting them back to my place for lunch. I was astounded that her family had come down all the way from Melbourne to view from collective middle-finger-up to this town.

\--------------------------------

Gemma's little sister called me over. Someone had termed my painting, "Horrifically apalling." I lit up a cigarette and let her have a few puffs. She sneezed at one point and smoke came out through her nose; a little puff like a child dragon. Gemma's little sister was very sweet; they didn't really look alike either.

  
"Do you even know what's going on?" Gemma's sister said to me. "All the activist groups are onto this; they saying really good stuff like you're bringing light to their cause and it just goes to show people the enormity of the crimes committed."

  
"That reminds me." I had done another drawing of a sex abuse victim holding a doll with a rope around it's neck; the doll was a Catholic priest. I brought the portrait out into the sitting room, put it above the fireplace on the mantle where the sunlight glowed gently on it, setting to dusk, and I posted the photo I took on Instagram. "Everyone is about empowering stupid women and everything; why don't we empower the people who had to suffer under the Scouts and the Churches and the Orphanages? It's not just women who get abused; men do too, yet because the victims and survivors are men, they just have to suck it up, apparently." I typed this on Instagram, and tagged it.

  
"You feel very strongly about this, don't you?" Gemma's Dad said to me. He and Gemma's Mum were on the couch, watching the evening news. "Church sexual abuse, the Neo-Nazi's..."

  
"The problem with me and the Klan is that they just don't think that Asian people and Black people are sub-human. They think other "white people" who are not Klan are sub-human to. If you're not Dutch or German, you're filth. And I'm full-blood Indigenous Cymry." I explained. "We used to rent industrial property to them. They refused to pay my Father went. We had to force them to pay us. £24,000. Plus I go into a restaurant and the Kraut filth call me a whore because I'm wearing jeans and a cropped-length t-shirt. I was about thirteen - so a few years ago now."

  
"That's awful!" Gemma said.

  
"There's no such thing as good people. There's just humans, if it comes to that." I gestured to all of them. "Good people is a term some dick came up with a hundred years ago and now everyone says it. It's fucking rubbish; total shit."

  
Gemma's little sister laughed. "You'd make a great school-teacher." She said. I blew her a kiss. Gemma and her Mum laughed. "Are you going to be on the news?" She asked. "Because, well, you'd think!"

  
"Everybody'll have a lot to say." Gemma's Dad said. I nodded, agreeing.

  
"I don't give a fuck, honestly. How was your steak?" I asked him. "I don't usually cook rare-done meat."

  
"It was delicious. Very interesting kitchen." He answered.

  
"Very old kitchen." Gemma's sister chipped in.

  
"Thanks honey." I went over and opened the windows. There was a nice breeze. As it came through the rooms, I wondered if Gemma's family knew about me and her and what we do. I wondered how it would be if the breeze could take my thoughts to their heads as well. When they left, taking Gemma with them, I listened to "Can't Help Falling In Love" by Kina Grannis.

  
_Some things are meant to be_

  
I looked up at the ceiling of my bedroom. I knew what I was going to paint next.


	32. Sisters, Yule Shopping, And Jude Law

There's an art in making art. It's a hefty skill to master. Most people never really master it. That's why they keep creating things that create new genres and new styles. This is why there is not just one form of art. There are hundreds of forms. The only thing I don't like about digital painting is that the craft of art is lost. Mixing and making the colours, creating the oils and the calico canvases; the process of washing the linen and then ironing it with the starch. Creating the canvas's as well. And then the actual process of painting; the control of the brush, the texture, the way you hold it, the pressure. If you make a mistake you just can't click and icon or a few buttons. 

  
I heard Gemma go, "Oy, gimme, gimme, gimme." In the background of the phone call.

  
"Sorry, one of the girls brought in a big box of lint and ferro roche, and you know what I'm like with chocolate." She giggled.

  
"I'm onto the caramel crowns."

  
"Oh, yum, I love them." Gemma giggled more.

  
"Look, who do you nominate as God?"

"Oh, no, I'm not doing Religeon -"

  
"No, no, no, you don't get it." I said. "You know people say Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Isreal Folau are God on Earth, yeah?"

  
"Israel Folau? The homophobic, racist, sexist guy who says the bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland are God's revenge for the same-sex marriage vote?"

  
"Oh, shit!" I groaned, squeezing my eyes shut for a minute. "I don't know why that came out; I meant Matt Damon."

  
Gemma nearly pissed herself laughing on the end of the line. "Hmmm." She considered. "Jude Law." A moment of silence went by. "Teagan, what are you doing?"

  
I bit into a caramel crown. "Put it this way; you thought the last one was shocking."

\-------------------------------

"Are you happy?"

  
"What's that supposed to mean?"

  
"Are you happy?"

  
"I'm not doing shit like this."

  
"So, you're not happy?"

  
"You're a drug-fucked art dealer." I told Roger, putting tea down in front of him.

  
"Lots of people have come in." He signed a check in front of him by the tea. "186 alone inquired about the photograph of your mural."

  
"Bloody hell."

  
"Are you happy?"

  
"Well...yeah."

"I think something's happened to you."

  
"It's...some sex I can't get over." I groaned, ending up telling him. I felt really tired all of a sudden.

  
"I know the sort."

  
"Yeah?"

  
"Yeah."

  
I spent ages afterwards drawing Gemma in her knickers. 

\---------------------------------

Yule shopping. Dad wrapped up a DVD for me that I had bought, along with a surprise he had got me. Two surprises for my sister, and another set of surprises for himself that he had bought that my sister and I didn't know about. The next morning I went shopping for more stuff to put under the Yule-tree. A new set of boots, plus ballet flats; another two films and supplies for the shop/gallery. More calico, some cotton-linen blends that are dark green I was going to make a tunic dress and wide-legged trousers out of, plus sewing-machine needles. I nearly killed the machine by putting the needle in a zig-zag stitch with a zipper foot on. What happened, the needle snapped, the end burying itself in the metal foot; the foot got stuck as did the whole machine. I had the tinker around with lubericant, a screwdriver and take the Janome half apart to clean it up. Little bits of metal were on the cotton threading. You, reader, probably have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about. 

  
Christmas is big business in Australia; it gives the local filth a even greater excuse to piss their money away. Which means I leave the house at six 'o' clock, by the time I get to the city it's just going eight 'o' clock. Get everything done by half-eight otherwise you are crushed by people, and it takes you forever to get served. You never use the self-checkouts. They always go topsy.

  
I really want to know what Dad bought me. No, genuinely, I really, really want to know.

  
"What does it say?" My sister asked me about a huge wall of text Gemma had sent me on my phone.

  
"Will you shut up and let me read it?" Gemma's text said something about her phone falling into a river and then a bowl of rice and then chaos and something.  
"Did she get over her face -"

  
"Shut up! I'm trying to read it."

  
"Why are you being such a bitch? Have you got your period or something?"

"No, let me fucking read it." Sister grabbed for the phone.

  
"Shut up and let me fucking read it!" I slapped Sister around the face sharply.

  
"Bitch!" She howled, trying to kick me but missing.

  
Always this behaviour. She just can't let me read a fucking text message. A few minutes later she came up to sitting room. "It's so hot downstairs. Up here it's nice and cool. I had a bath this morning and I'm just drenched in sweat. She laid down on the floor meekly by my feet and gave me my phone.

  
What happened with Gemma was that she dropped her phone into a river and had to rest it in rice for a while and she wanted to come up tomorrow.

  
"Kristen" by Cigarettes After Sex is officailly the most depressing song on the fucking planet. Miserable shit.

  
I love Michael Buble singing "December Night". He's a hottie, too. But Gemma's tip top number one.


	33. Christmas Eve Divinyls Style

The resaurant where I took Gemma sometimes was having a Christmas Eve do; but, frankly, it has nothing on last years. No Christmas Eve party in living history ever could.   
There was an Australian rock band in the 1980's, called the "Divinyls". They were headed up by lead singer who has now died from cancer, Chrissie Amphlett. Her on-stage costumes - largely for her career - consisted of black stockings with garter belt attached, in a mini-skirt or mini-dress of varying styles. Nearly always had her tits out. One year they wrote a song called, "I Touch Myself", based on Chrissie's sexual relationship with whoever it was that had been the "love of her life" at the time, in-between the drug and alcohol addictions.

  
This was the year that I came up with an idea to be a total prat; cantankerous, rude, stubborn, foul-mouth, temperamental - a total Queen.

  
Gemma knew a few guys in her University who could play musical instruments and who could sing and had boof haircuts even though they were studying law and physics. Two electric guitarists plus a bass eletric guitarist, a drummer, and three back-up singers, one of which was Gemma's little sister. 

  
"Shit, what the fuck am I actually doing?" I stabbed myself in the eye with the mascara brush, getting ready in the third storey bathrooms above the restaurant. I swore more at the side of a panda-bear eye looking back at me. Gemma had offered to do my make-up for me, but as soon as the words had come out of her mouth, any common sense along with my brain walked out of my skull and went for a holiday. It didn't return for about four hours, to be exact. In the meantime I had assured her I'd be ok to do it, and I also had made some outrageous suggested about organizing the clothes.

  
A few people actually screamed out as they recognised the tempo of the electric guitar on bass that was played in the lead-up to the song. I had swallowed a few beers beforehand, trying to get some Dutch courage. The irony is drink usually makes me tried. That night, I was wired. 

  
"I love myself," I grinned after the first line; this time people really did scream and cheer. Who would have thought that a bunch of twats in their early twenties would be singing the Divinyl's? "I want you to love me. When I'm feeling down, I want you above me..."

  
I tried looking for Gemma's face but I couldn't find her. It was a new kind of feeling, singing due to an idea from her with her nowhere in sight, but her little sister and her two friends behind me humming backup, swinging tiny bottoms from side to side.

  
"I search myself, I want you to find me. I forget myself, I want you to remind me -" I whistled out, and I kicked out of my legs. I was half-drunk and half-wired and half pissed off; put that with sudden insane jealousy, a fairly cantankerous temperament anyhow, and 80's music - now that's modern alchemy.

  
Even though the singing should have been effortless, and it sounded good enough, I could feel a tightness in my chest from the effort getting the notes to croon and make a bit of an effort to have Chrissie Amphlett's twang on her notes. Maybe it was just the sick feeling from not seeing Gemma that made my chest feel like that, thought. "You're the one who makes me coming running, you're the sun who makes me shine. When you're around I'm always laughin', I want to make you mine." I was surrounded by people who I didn't know - the most of them - and if the larger majority knew a few more facts about me that they'd probably spend a lifetime hating my guts. They were all dressed in santa hats, baubles, mini-dresses, denim shorts and skirts, bikini tops, bralettes, mesh creations, and in some cases, no tops at all.

  
I love her dearly, but I was planning to spend a lifetime hating Gemma's guts. My voice went bigger and louder, and I got a bit more into the gig through the pleasant sort of dizziness drowning my figure. "I close my eyes and see you before me. Think I would die if you were to ignore me. A fool could see just how much I adore you -" I swooped down onto my knees on the stage, cleanly unhitching the microphone from it's stand and bringing it down with me. "I'd get down on my knees, I'd do anything for you."

  
I was high, to a point that extended beyond words. "I don't want anybody else; when I think about you, I touch myself. Oh, I don't want anybody else, oh, no. Oh, no, oh, no."  
I wanted her to turn up so badly so I could see her face. But what if I was wrong, just in that moment? She was somewhere - maybe even filming - and I just couldn't see her from the semi-permanent stage that had been built up on the centre of the restaurant floor. Either way, Gemma could take a picture of all my flaws or take a video on her phone. She knows that I would talk, but I'm always going to be too afraid to do things first-up. Much less bringing her home, or anything like that. 

  
"I love myself, I want you to love me. When I feel down, I want you above me. I search myself, I want you to find me. I forget myself, I want you to remind me." One of the boys let our a soaring guitar rift that split my head open, but I didn't trip. Thank fucking God. "I don't want anybody else. When I think about you, I touch myself. Oh, I don't want anybody else, oh, no. Oh, no, oh, no."

  
The boys on their electric guitars jumped in at the end of the verse to play their solo's on their instruments; all the while, I just talked. No more than a few lines.

  
"Gemma? Gemma here tonight? Can you come up to the front so I can see you? Ladies and gents, she's the woman who conned me into doing this. I was literally half-asleep with a fag in my mouth and she sprouts up this shit." I grinned as the boy's solo's came to an end, and the crowd in the restaurant cheered, made sympathetic "aww" sounds, and they laughed. Everyone had mostly been laughing and cheering and dancing, getting drunk. It was probably the most sensible thing anyone in the whole building had done all night.

"I'm up here you plonker, just finish the bloody song!" Gemma's voice shouted, using all my words.

  
_Fuck you, Chrissie_ , I thought to myself. _You never got laid as well as I did, love_

  
"I don't want anybody else. When I think about you, I touch myself," I messed my hair up with one hand, even though it wasn't as though it wasn't wild and curly and thick enough. "I don't want anybody else. When I think about you, I touch myself. I touch myself, I touch myself." Gemma's little sister and her friends behind me and the boys playing their instruments sang "I don't want anybody else. When I think about you, I touch myself" over and over and over again. "I touch myself, I touch myself. I touch myself, I touch myself. I touch myself, I honestly do -" I jumped up and down before sitting on the stage, letting my bare legs dangle over the edge. "I touch myself, I touch myself. I touch myself, I honestly do. I touch myself, I touch myself, I touch myself...."

  
It took a flat three seconds for the idiots in the building to realize the song was over. That's pretty typical of the Australian public, isn't it? They managed to get their act and graces together and give an applause. 

  
To this day it was one of the most electrifying experiences of my life. I think about it all of the time. There's just a moment where it is just you trying, and that sound been radiated into the microphone as the lights hit your eyes and you see a hundred people before you dancing and smiling, drinking and laughing. There's a thrill in knowing you're getting it right; knowing you're doing it right. You're a drug, and everybody is happy to endorse you into their worlds.

  
Fuck, they should have done, too; before that night last year, I don't think I had ever been so un-dressed in public. Black latex mary-widow cut corset, bikini-cut knickers, stay-up stockings - that I can certainly tell you do not stay up. I had just had Mark and his son lift me up onto the stage, and, next thing, I had thick black rolls of synthetic black fabric around my ankles. The bloody things had no grip whatsoever.

  
The song is sort of dumb; that's why people laugh their heads off an enjoy it so much. There's a desperation in it. "A fool could see just how much I adore you; I'd get down on my knees, I'd do anything for you."

  
"Oh my God, you did so well!" Gemma rushed into a back room of the restaurant, half bent over over with her arms stretched out for a hug; I was sitting on a futon couch with a beer half-topped up with raspberry lemonade. Mark had pissed himself laughing when I asked him if he could mix the drink like that for me. Don't ask me how. I just like it. Gemma kissed my face, her palms either either side of my face, her fingertips pressed against my hair and my temples. "I couldn't believe my ears when I heard that song! I thought you'd sing a song you'd like - Hozier, Lorde, The 1975."

  
"I don't just like them. Chrissie Amphlett was a nutter but she was cool. I like that song anyway. When I was twelve and thirteen I hated it, but now I love the song. Time goes by and changes things, eh?" I reached for my handbag, but Gemma got it for me, and fished out the packet of Longbeach Fine's, and a box of matches. I preferred using matches over gas-lighters. Gemma was crouching down on the floor in front of me; her knees touched my legs. It made it a bit awkward for smoking; you know what they say about girls with burnt noses and second-hand smoke inhalation.

  
"What do we do now?" I asked, tipping my head back and shooting smoke to the ceiling. It curled above us like a large halo before dissipating in a sea of fresh oxygen. Even though I was still pretty high, I felt like a dickhead sitting on that couch in the Dominatrix underwear, the show over but people still hustling and bustling about with laughter and wine and general happiness. It was still Christmas. 

  
Gemma didn't know, but neither did I. So we just sat there. I gestured for her to hop up off the floor. We just sat together for ages, me chain-smoking. I needed something to do with my hands because otherwise they would have been on her. 


	34. Sexy Underwear - That Beith The Question

Wear sexy underwear or don't wear sexy underwear, that beith the question.

  
Thou theory of everything; currently.

  
And, yes sire and ladies, I am speaking William Shakespearian. Why hath be?

  
'Cause I cocking feel like it and I'm tossing up between Yves Saint Laurent Lipstick and homemade lip-gloss. The lip-gloss tastes nice whereas the YSL looks fantastic but it tastes awful and stains fabric shirts and bras.

  
You know what it's like leading up to Christmas and you happen - by sheer dumb luck - to have a astonishingly attractive woman think you're a hottie.


	35. Abercrombie & Finch

It was a good day. I was sitting at my Grandmother's dining-room table in our 1970's era built Welsh house with the timber panelling everywhere, the exposed brick, the fireplace the size of a Leyland Mini, the carvings of the green man and the Sea God Llyr's spirits, alone with Selkies and Jack, Man of the Frost on the door of the bedroom that my sister and I shared at our weekly sleepovers at my Grandmothers. "Shh." My Grandmother - Nanna - whispered to my Dad. "I'm making Teagie a drink."

  
She didn't think I heard, but I did. Lemon, Lime and Bitters in a World War Two era crystal glass. It was gorgeous. The chicken and the turkey she cooked was the best we had ever had. The cherries and blueberries that came out of the orchard with the apricots, nectarines, plums and mangoes were beautiful as well. I didn't pay much attention to the sunset on Christmas day; it's something I usually get quite antsy about. Something else happened that night that means a lot to me. I just cannot remember it. I though all the day, write it down. I can remember thoughts of mine when I was a small child, yet I can't remember that.

  
Gemma got me Abercrombie & Finch perfume plus a pair of crocodile skin high-heeled sandals in my size for my tiny feet. I was beyond delighted; butterflies grew wild in my head and stomach and spine, fluttering about and making me blush and giggle and smile. I wore a handmade dress. It was a pinky cream fabric patterned with gold embroidered hycainth flowers. It was flower length and sleeveless and it was nice and loose. I would have made it my size, a size ten, but on the safe side I made it a size twelve considering how much I would eat and how little I would exercise.

  
"I want you to be like the boy in the Abercrombie & Finch ad." Gemma murmured in my ear, coming up behind me and wrapping her arms around me.

  
"What? In jocks?" I giggled again. I felt high.

  
"Naked from the hips up." I felt Gemma's mouth and breath on my ear. I pressed my body back into her's and she held it there. "But...there's something we could do."

\----------------------------------

Putting on a pair on male underwear for the first time in your life is like a man wearing a set of bra's and knicker's for the first time. Gemma bit her lip as I came into the room. I felt like a bit of a twat but I could feel what she felt too; there was an eroticism, and there always was in any form of sex. And our sex...I can't really put it into words.  
There's still a belief that you can't believe you're actually doing it; the matters of youth. The first major relationship of your life is always in tepid waters; you try to keep it as hot as you can without burning yourself. You never want the waters to turn cold. When the cold seeps into your bones and filles your head...it renders you still. But some people love the cold. They thrive in it. They worship it.

  
"Hey..." Gemma smiled, sitting up on the bed from where she had been relaxing back against the pillows as I walked into the bedroom. I quirked my mouth, and she laughed softly in response, her hands pressing together like a prayer, touching her mouth and nose before her hands settled flat on the mattress either side of her thighs.

  
"Frankly..." I ducked my head and moving my hands as I spoke. "If you had smeared my nipples in chocolate and then choked in the process while licking it off, I would find that more sexually attractive."

  
Gemma burst out laughing. "You're so much like Dawn French sometimes." She said to me.

  
"Chocolate and sex - yep, pretty much the best thing ever." I held my hands up in surrender and got onto the bed. "And if you're wish to Santa was to give me a willy, well, sorry, it's not happened." I pulled out the waistband of the jocks with my thumbs and had a check to illustrate the point. Gemma hummed, and looked down there as well. I snapped the elastic back and slapped the side of her neck lightly.

  
For some reason I stupidly said, "Hubba hubba." 


	36. Boxing Day

I hesitated. My arms were crossed beneath my chest, and there was a summer breeze that was lovely blowing through the air. I reflected I might be a bit cold walking home, but in the end, I didn't mind. It was marvel how my nightie's skirt got wetter as the inches of water rose up my legs as I walked in. Above my knees and then the middle of my thighs. Vain of me probably, but I wanted a huge audience, lots of people to see. So what that I could be fined? I don't care at all.

  
I had been watching a film. Mary Shelley. It was only very early in the film that I decided I had had enough of it. Watching her chemistry with Percy Shelley - in the film - made me extremely and bitterly jealous. Rather, for a note, at that time of the film she was still Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin at the time. I wasn't in a temper, but I was dark. I wanted to swim. I haven't swam in nearly two years, not properly. I was dying to do it; it was this unitchable urge that it turns out there was a cure for. I had to do it, I needed to do it. I wanted to do it. I decided on the driveway that so many cars drove up and down over the years. Once, to see the view of the lake, now, to see my gallery and my shop. I walked out of the and property the road. When I entered the through the gates, there is a lot of garden and forest before the road leads you down to the water. I walked down a bit of grass through some Elm trees; from this view I could directly see the front of my house and shop. I heard a man yell out something like, "Don't go to the water!" or "Don't go down that way!"

  
I walked into the water, ankle deep at first, before wondering up to anothe section of the reservoir where all the families were, and then back again. I was slightly nervous about doing it, even though I was desperate for something to exbound me, just utterly feel me up. The water was nice and cool and welcoming. It was blissful and natural and entrancing.

  
 _Fucking idiots yelling_ , I thought. It might have been the caretakers of the grounds, but I just took it as drunk male campers yelling after a few beers. It didn't bother me at all.  
 _Fuck it_ , I thought. _I'll do whatever I want. Whatever I want. What right have they? It's a body of water which I own all the land down to and I'm a pagan woman. It's my right to come down and "worship" in the water; religious freedom act, eh? For anyone who asks me what I am doing, sod it. I own this fucking lake_

  
I tipped backwards into the water as though I was been baptised. 

  
It's technically illegal to swim the water. I was in a cotton nightie and a shirt, but I didn't care. The feeling of rocks and lake silt beneath my feet was entrancing. I looked directly into a security camera. I didn't care. I still don't care. They don't mow their bloody grass, and they get council big-wigs to send me letters in the post about said grass that apparently neither the council of the lake governance owns. I walked back to house along the lake, past families of Anglo's and Indians having picnics and boxing day parties. I was soaking wet; the fabric of my clothes clung to me like a second skin and you could probably see my nipples from Venus. As I was walking back up the road, and old man walked by in shorts and a hat, wearing socks and sandals. "Hello." I said to him, smiling. I had been flicking my hips as I walked up the road; self-confidence and a delirious self-pride if you will. I've always had Welshwomen curves; much to the delight of many people I'm sure. A nice bum is a nice bum, no matter which continent your on.

  
"Lovely." he smiled back at me.

  
While I was walking back, flicking my hips side to side, I considered how would it be if I went there again, swam stark naked, and walked back with wet hair and wet skin in a red Yves Saint Laurent or a simple handwoven straw one, smoking a cigarette.

  
That'll be the next thing. I'll swim bloody naked in that lake if I want to.


	37. I'm Sure That You're Not Just Another Girl

I worked out today that I've got 148 canvases with Gemma painted on them. `I've also worked out that each year my smoking habit costs me £16,303.47. Which means that over the course of six years that is £81, 517.35.

  
This canvas's are up in my studio, my cupboards, my walk-in robe, my 1930's free-standing closet that is used as a store-cupboard, my attic. Dozens of sketchbooks, all filled with ink and graphite, showing Gemma's face and Gemma's body. How many hours I have spent, on the soundtrack to Lewis Capaldi, The 1975, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Alexandre Desplat, Paloma Faith, Ed Sheeran, Khalid, Hozier, Rixton, Rita Ora, Sam Smith, Novo Amor, One Direction, Gaho, Maroon 5. Hours and hours and hours. Her cheekbones, her eyes. The shape of her mouth and her chin. Her neck and the line of her clothes on her body. Chinese qi pao's and other han fu. Sundresses and evening gowns; nighties and nudity and simple styles. Gemma chilling about in jeans and a t-shirt. On scene I painted of her dancing around my sitting room with her bra dangling from the old Victorian gasolier because she had chucked it up there.

  
Why do I do all of this?

  
It just is, I suppose can be your answer. I suppose it just must have to be. 


	38. As Hard As A Nut

"There is this Danish author, right? And he described this woman who decided to have a threesome then a foursome with his girlfriend and another guy in a free love camp; and he described her rolls of fat wobbling as she thrashed and moaned and yelled and she had a clitorious as hard as a nut -" I broke, off revolted. It genuinely makes me revolted. Women like that in sex are disgusting. They truly fucking are disgusting. Gemma didn't sound well for the world, either, after hearing that, but I had to vent it out of my system. I still feel very quiet. After I wrote that piece about been by myself for eight years in the chapter, "Have You Ever Had Your Tits Out On Screen", I've just been very quiet. I thought seeing Gemma the next morning...I knew she wouldn't bound down happy. I watched her sleep for a while, and then I hid in a broom cupboard with paints and rolls of calico and mousetraps while she screamed and yelled for me and eventually left. I heard the car's brakes scream as she tried to dirve off with the handbrake still on. I think I made her cry.  
This is where we ended up; I called her that evening and we talked. I got through eight cigarettes. I was amazed that she was happy to talk to me. I thought I had inadvertently fucked everything up. 

  
My Father brought a lottery ticket for thirty million. I have this thought that resounding positivity will make the Goddess of Fate tip move her hands to his - our - direction. We're talking eight figures here, this lottery. That'd be quite lovely, safely nestled in our bank and under the stairs. It would be well cherished and well loved, I promise you.  
I had a look through dating sites and profiles earlier on social media and the internet. It made me scoff. I've tried that all before. Always a fucking diaster. I dumped five people, and I got dumped twice.

  
Lovely jubbly, isn't it? Online dating? Online relationships? I think fucking not!

  
The dickheads and the mentally ill and the ugly bastards who get on there - they are absolutely fucking revolting! You come home with one of them, explain what you are and what you do, and they grunt like a cave-man. Not idea about it. No idea about anything. Online dating - to me - is absolutely fucking hopeless. Total cocking bullshit.  
But, then, bars and clubs - I've never gone into them. I've never done that. I'm not going to meet my Mr Perfect in one, either, I think. I used to hang hope I would find someone in the Library. Didn't work. Only weirdo's hang out at libraries....like me for example.

  
Fuck, that's great as well for your self-confidence.

  
Right, enough of that, enough of that.

  
"Where did you go? I couldn't find you earlier." Gemma asked me.

  
"I went out for a swim." I told her. "I spent the best part of an hour underwater."

  
"Oh." Gemma responded. I heard a man's voice in the background.

  
"I'll let you go." I said, and I hung up abruptly. That single action would have hurt her just as much as anything else I've ever much done.

  
I screamed at the ceiling. Of course I hate him. I absolutely fucking hate him, this mystery boyfriend.


End file.
